Would You Like a Cup of Tea?

I did my first 4 work-required presentations to 4 classrooms full of high school students this monday. It's a good sign, I hope, that by the fourth I was no longer paralyzed with nervousness.
I am so damn intimidated by high school students. jeebus.
Somehow, during the presentation I was making the senior physics studens the topic veered into Female Genital Mutilation. I mean, god damn. I really wanted to bring it up because it is so relevent to the work my organization does. We've built 15 schools in Mali in the past five years and I really think that advancing educational oppurtunities in areas where FGM happens is the most effect and least culturally imperialist way to stop it. The villages where we've built have 100% illiteracy rate. These are Muslim communities where no one knows how to actually read the Koran so they are open to all sorts of misonceptions and superstitions about what the Koran actually says. Now there's some 20,000 kids who are going to grow up literate and able to look at the Koran and notice that it pretty much straight out forbids this kind of mutilation of women. Plus, we require the villages to commit to educating women and men equally so a whole generation of girls are going to grow up with the tools to stop this from happening to their daughters.
Nonetheless, I will face all the tortures of hell before I will say "clitoris" in front of a bunch of 17 year olds. Damn. Fortunatly, the teacher came to my aid. She has, evidently, no such squeamishness. The 3 girls in the class were absolutly incensed and 2 of them came to the afterschool meeting I held.
Yay.