By Rukmini Callimachi
She struggles under her own weight, lumbering up the stairs, her thighs shaking with each step.
Once she reaches the top, it will take several minutes for 50-year-old Mey Mint to catch her breath, the air hissing painfully in and out of her chest.
Her rippling flesh is not the result of careless overeating, but rather of a tradition of force-feeding girls in a desert nation where obesity has long been the ideal of beauty, signalling a family's wealth in a land repeatedly wrecked by drought.
'My mother thinks she made me beautiful. But she made me sick' To make a girl big and plump, the tradition of 'gavage' - a French word borrowed from the practice of fattening of geese for foie gras - starts as early as four, as it did for Mint, who was forced to drink 55 litres of camel's milk a day. When she vomited, she was beaten.
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If she refused to drink, her fingers were bent back until they touched her hand. Her stomach hurt so much she prayed all the animals in the world would die so that there would be no more milk to be had.
Now, she has trouble walking and suffers from a combination of weight-related illnesses, including diabetes and heart disease.
"My mother thinks she made me beautiful. But she made me sick," says Mint, who asked that her full last name not be disclosed because she feels embarrassed by her past.
To end the brutal practice, the government launched a TV and radio campaign highlighting the risks of obesity. Because most Mauritanian love songs describe the ideal woman as fat, the health ministry commissioned catchy odes to thin women.
These efforts, combined with the rising popularity of foreign soap operas featuring model-thin women, has helped stamp out the practice among the country's urban elite.
Only one in 10 women under age 19 has been force-fed, compared to a third of women 40 or older, according to a survey by the National Office of Statistics in 2001, the most recent available.
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