Bogaletch Gebre cannot be sure of her exact age. She was born in rural Ethiopia in the 1950s into circumstances "not much different than most of the girls of my time". The absence of a birth certificate was the most benign aspect of the time, place and gender she was born into.
Life for the women of Kembatta was "grindingly hard", she remembers, and the passage from girl to woman was painful and potentially deadly. She was circumcised when she was 12, and she nearly bled to death after the procedure.
The process, now referred to as female genital mutilation, was part of local tradition and no girl would be fit to marry without undergoing it. Marriage was often just as traumatic. Custom in Kembatta allowed men to seize a girl, rape her and then marry her. These "bridal abductions" were common and families of girls taken in this brutal manner would rather accept the marriage than take back a girl who had lost her virginity.
Gebre went on to became one of Ethiopia's most accomplished women. This week she joined a list of heroes when she collected the King Baudouin African Development Prize.
Her escape from what she calls the "life of a servant" took daring. Her salvation began when, with the help of her sisters and her mother, she attended classes and learned to read. Her father, who would have objected, was not told until later.
Gebre became the first girl in her area to complete primary education and won a scholarship to the only boarding school that accepted girls in the capital, Addis Ababa. It was the beginning of an academic career that took her to Jerusalem to study microbiology and then as a Fulbright scholar to Amherst in Massachusetts and finally to a post-graduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles.
She eventually decided to return to Ethiopia and the struggles that scarred her childhood. She was haunted by the loss of an elder sister who died trying to give birth to twins because of complications brought on by the female genital mutilation she had suffered.
"If I didn't want to go back and change things, there would have been something wrong with me."
In the 1990s she set up Kembatti Mentti Gezzima-Tope – Kembatti Women Stand Together. The founding principle of the organisation, she says, was that it was pointless to go into the rural areas and tell people what to do. Instead they would convene "community conversations", often using the scourge of HIV and Aids as a starting point. The conversation would invariably move on to other topics such as bridal abductions and female genital mutilation.
"I don't tell people to stop," she says. "They decide to stop."
Gebre found that while people insisted that mutilating their girls was part of the culture, they had no idea of its origin. Once the myths were confronted and women were given a chance to speak, the community's attitude changed.
In the areas where her organisation has worked, female circumcision has decreased from 100% to just 3% among pre-adolescents, and international organisations have been studying its methods in the hope of replicating its success.
In recent years she has seen women give birth to triplets. "It might sound funny, but I had the feeling I had avenged my sister against death."