"Without education, you must work in the farm," Vivian says as she explains her panel to me..

I mentioned before that one of my goals here is to create a set of advocacy quilts. These will be parallel quilts created by a widows’ group and the girls at our school, demonstrating, respectively, the traditional oppression of Maasai women and the opportunities that education will afford young Maasai girls. Cleia documented the quilting process with the Rehema women well in her August blog post. I want to give a quick visual of how phenomenally the quilting project with the girls is going; I will let the photos guide this post.

"Cultural Awareness" class: The girls are helped by local beadwork expert Parako to learn about the beneficial parts of their culture, and to learn how to sew beads in the traditional style.

Parako demonstrates the proper technique. Only around 20% of the girls had been taught how to create traditional beadwork by their mothers or grandmothers. Again, Kakenya works to emphasize positive aspects of Maasai culture while also educating about the harmful aspects.

A class 6 pupil during the drawing stage. The girls were prompted with themes of "the importance of education" or "how will I use my education?"

Class 6 holds up their drawings, ready to begin beading the quilting squares.

Peyiai wants to be a pilot when she grows up!

Kakenya Centre for Excellence girls use their free time to bead (or, "shona shanga") their stories on the lawn.

Shona shanga! The girls love having a craft to work on during their free time. I keep finding them in the classroom working on their projects during lunch!

Gladys, in front, is creating a panel about how she would like to build a school for handicapped children when she grows up.

The lovely Gladys again, with her panel.

The final product: Here we see a panel created by Brenda Nashipai, explaining that eucation is important because you can learn about things to which you are not normally exposed, like the internet.

We are almost finished with the panels that the Rehema Widows’ Group is making, too. The next step will be to document each woman and child’s story to create a sort of “cliff notes” to accompany the quilts.

I am on my way out of the country for a month. I had intended to leave my fellowship now… but I just love what we are doing here too much and cannot seem to rip myself away from Enoosaen for good, so I’ll be back in October!

Madam Rose, in her mud home in Enoosaen, ponders the possibilities and needs for rescuing Maasai girls

Rose, a teacher with fifteen years of experience, has always wanted to help needy girls stay in school. She does what she can, helping to put 6 girls through school and take care of them on school holidays. “I just think, if I had a lot of money, wow… I feel I am not doing enough.” Even when she was not financially secure enough to pay any school fees, as a new teacher, “it was always on my mind, it was a dream.” She was inspired by the idea that people should help their own communities; “I saw other people giving Kenyans scholarships and I though, if other people can help us, why not us?”

As with many of the local agents of change, Rose’s story begins with her own struggle to be educated. In her day, Maasai women were not meant to stay in school, but because Rose Mashara’s father was a pastor, she managed to finish her schooling. At first, however, her schools were teaching her so poorly that they allowed her to advance to grade 4 without even knowing how to read. When her father found out, he transferred her to a boarding school far away, largely populated by girls from different tribes. That did not protect her from the scourge of FGM though. Despite her exposure to other tribes and her parents’ education and religion, Rose says, “we did it in my house because of pressure from friends and relatives. I never wanted to discuss it with the other girls at school.” She envied that they would not be forced to undergo the cut. Rose put off her circumcision for as long as she could, but after teaching college, she felt there was no way out.

She could not escape the attitude of the women in her community about her teaching as an uncut woman. They ridiculed her, saying things about her inability to teach girls if she were still a girl herself, and that she is too old to be uncut; “Now you, what kind of a knife is going to be used now that you are old and stiff?” So, she did it, her parents calling a nurse from a district hospital. “It was not done for our benefit, it was done for the community,” Rose laments.

After her own experience her mind was made up and she set out to convince her parents of the uselessness of the cut, preventing her younger sisters from having to undergo the same. Maasais believe the cut somehow makes you more mature, a “real woman,” but after the cut, Rose says, “I was not changed. Character is the only thing that makes your person.”

Now, Rose helps other girls who have escaped the cut or forced marriages stay in school by filling in the gaps and catching girls that other programs and institutions fail to help. At st. Josephs, she would see a lot of big scholarships given and then sometimes taken away for fail to fulfill the girls’ non-school needs (i.e. pullovers and sanitary napkins, etc.). GTZ, for example, had given several St. Joseph’s girls scholarships but the program ended abruptly, leaving the girls with nothing. Some girls went home to ask for assistance and instead were married off. Pauline was one of those girls, and had she gone home her parents would surely have married her off. But she stuck it out at school, getting by borrowing soap from other girls and using a cloth during her period. She was unable to even attend class during menstruation until Rose realized what was going on and took her in.

Madam Rose with Pauline, one of the girls she sends to school

But people sometimes put up a fuss when she has tried to help girls deemed beyond help academically, or girls who put a great strain on her finances; “people were telling me, why do you want to assist other children? What about your own? It made me want to do what I do alone, silently help.”

Rose becomes mother, teacher, patron, and caretaker to the girls she takes in. Yet by doing these things on an individual, quiet basis, she does not have access to the resources or connections like more prominent projects for rescuing girls. Sometimes she reads about well-known women, even people like Caroline Ramat, who can stand tall and know who to call for assistance. “I start feeling inferior. They know who to call, and I don’t.” Besides that, some of these women and organizations do not attend to the emotional or even all of the basic needs of the children. When finances do not permit, they seem not to care enough to dig deep into their own pockets like Rose has so often done. She gives literally everything she can to make sure the girls she takes in stay in school, even with the enormously high current cost of food and living in Kenya. For months she has deferred her own continuing education college studies, not wanting to go for a term of college herself if the girls’ fees cannot be paid.

Madam Rose has had to stand strong in the face of sometimes almost insurmountable opposition, both to her own disinterest in getting cut and getting married, and also to her project to take in and rescue girls escaping marriage, FGM, or parents who will not pay their daughters' school fees.

Some are calling it “Independence day for women.” MP Sophia Abdi Noor said, “Men got their independence in 1963 – but today women have achieved independence from the cruel hands of society.”

This week two anti-FGM/C laws were passed in the Kenyan parliament as part of the Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation Bill. These laws make it illegal (entirely, as opposed to just by force or just for a minor) to practice or procure the cut, and bring about much more severe consequences for offenders. The bill proposes a seven-year jail sentence and a fine of 500,000 Kenya shillings for people who force women to undergo the cut. If a woman dies while undergoing the cut, the person responsible would receive a life sentence.

The bill also makes it a crime to ridicule a woman who has not undergone the cut, so that using derogatory or abusive language towards a woman because she has not undergone the cut can land you six months in jail, a 50,000 shilling fine, or both. This part is particularly uplifting to me, as I have spoken to several women who say that they or their loved ones have undergone the cut largely as a result of the fact that they may be ridiculed, even professionally held back, if they were to reject circumcision. It is fantastic that the bill recognizes the severity of community pressure to undergo the cut. The bill has yet to be signed into law by the president, but seems widely assumed that he will do so.

I celebrate the work of the many advocates and the Kenyan Women Parliamentary Association for their tireless efforts to protect girls from FGM/C. The law certainly will not stop the practice entirely, but it will bolster those opposing FGM and may help to bring about a change in attitude.

Now we must begin to advocate for the implementation of the enacted law. As I have written about before, the implementation of laws relating to domestic oppression of women in rural areas is agonizingly weak. For now, I am spreading the news as fast as I can, hoping at the least to get a conversation about the severity of the crime started, and maybe even garner a little more support from the local government.

In this post I want to explain how activist Helen Rotich has addressed the male and youth angles of eradicating FGC. One of the most interesting misconceptions about the grip that FGC has on the Maasai is  that it is driven by males, where as in fact the practice is perpetuated just as much and more so by women. Still, incorporating men is an important step in any community engagement effort to decrease circumcision and early marriage, since men have a monopoly on the important positions and government offices in the community.

Hellen leading a lecture on FGC during our April Health and Leadership Workshop

Men Initiative:

At the same time as she was working with traditional circumcisers, Helen also formed group called Men Initiative, to which she invited leaders in the community including village elders, medical personel, public health officers, chiefs, head teachers, government officers – the people she believed parents would listen to. She also invited some “dynamic youths” she felt would be able to help sensitize the other youths. So, as a volunteer, she called them together for a seminar, providing them tea and the like to get them involved.

To these men, Helen explained the dangers of various forms of violence against women, “of course not calling it really those names, because then they would see it like “we want to fight men,” so just saying things like “our daughters are going things that others are not going through, and maybe it is outdated.”” She called on these men to use every forum they could, such as when chiefs call barazas (a meeting during which chiefs call the community together to distribute information), to disseminate their message. Helen explains that it helps to have the men on board “because as a woman, if you stand, people might not take it so seriously. Because people just say, “women, they talk like that. Women, you know?” And they will not see a sense”

The youth, and the “Sisters’ keepers:”

While reaching out to circumcisers is sort of “cool” – it feels somehow like one must really be getting to the illicit side of the activity – it does nothing to stop the demand for their services, and this is why she is also targeting mothers and youth, the groups who actually generate demand for FGC.

She used the same women she had extracted from the menacing world of cutting for cash to act as trainers and facilitators when she held seminars for young girls.  Every holiday when schools close, she brings together girls of different ages, preparing them with information appropriate for their age. At the end of primary school, she hosts a rite of passage ceremony for them, and a full weeklong training. They train these youths in different capacity building techniques empower them to be able “to pressurize their villages to understand “hey we don’t need any more of circumcision for girls.”

But educating girls brought up another challenge: educated girls who are rejecting FGM will still “need to be married” to boys from around the community. So, sensing the need to train boys as well, she started programs on gender equality with the male youth. In this forum, she trained them on gender-based violence, including FGM and rape, and then she promoted open debate on topics like “would you like to have a circumcised girl or uncircumcised?” Says Helen; “when they come to know the difference between a circumcised girl and uncircumcised, and what they can even enjoy in their relationship when they are married, they start of course also not wanting a circumcised girl.”

“Through those kind of debates then they get to learn more, and getting more facts about FGM, the impacts, the consequences, and how that has brought us down in our community that the girls are not competitive enough with other women from other areas, then they start now being the sister’s keeper.”  Saying this, Helen lights up with a mischevious and clever smile. “So the girls don’t have to run away from home because the brother is there to say “no what do you want her to do that?” So it became a kind of a teamwork in fighting FGM.”

Unfortunately, Helen hasn’t gotten any formal evaluation of the effectiveness of her program, mainly for lack of funding. Anecdotally, it sounds like it has been extremely effective, and at the very least it is an innovative approach coming from a woman from within the community. Impressed as I am, however, I am a big proponent of results-based interventions. Still, Helen is a woman who faced major obstacles but who knew what she needed to do to combat FGM because of her experience with a twice cut pubic area and a cruelly oppressive society.

Helen made some very interesting decisions in how to incorporate the traditional female circumcisers in the Anti-Feminine Genital Mutilation program she started in coordination with the Women’s Federation for World Peace and the Maendeleo Ya Wanawake Organization. This post is an elaboration on the program I mentioned in my last post. Please forgive the length, but I think the details of how she is tackling the issue are worth exploring, and hope you find them to be interesting also.

Hellen Rotich leading a leadership and teamwork activity

Traditional Surgeons:

The first step of her program was to reach out to the “traditional surgeons”: women who do circumcisions like a commercial kind of job, traditionally called te-mosianisek or temosianiti. She is very frank about the fact that only about half of those to whom she has reached out have really “bitten” on her bate, and become involved in her program in a long term way. But those who have, have not only involved themselves but have continued to rally their peers.

Of course these women were resistant at first, “hiding because they thought it was the government who would want to take them by law and charge them or maybe jail them and fine them.” Helen’s team got around this resistance by first inviting other women also, such as traditional birth attendants, to the trainings, under the guise of a more generic women’s seminar. She would incentivize attendees by providing fare for transport, and she built interest by having the first attendees serve as “ambassadors” to go back and tell others how much they learned. Here she recounts how she approached the issue first through the health hazards facing the practitioners themselves:

“I told them what they have been doing was very important for our culture. Then we went through the many cultures that the Kipsigis have, then I was asking them which ones are still very good, and which ones are bad, and why do they think they’re bad, and so I took them around that. And then finally I approached it through HIV because at that time the HIV prevalence was very high it was at 14% that was around 2001-2003 there. And so I said you know we are fighting things, and I said you know the girls and even you, the people who are touching those parts of the women that gets these disease, you need to know. So I approach it through HIV and I show them some videos which shows some various affected areas…. immediately they saw the video they said they’re no longer going to touch any girl, so the dropped the activity.”

The economics of performing the cut:

Helen realized she had to think about the entire system of why people perform the cut, and not just about the tradition of circumcision itself. She turned to aligning incentives for the traditional surgeons so that they would be able to drop that profession for good if they so desired.

At the end of every year, the circumcisers get money for cutting the girls (the November/December school holiday is the most common time to hold the ceremony). In Helen’s area, the prices are apparently as follows: If a girl is not a virgin, they get 600 Kenya shillings ($7.50); if the girl has a child, then the figure goes up to 700 shillings ($8.75); for a virgin, the price is about 300-400 shillings ($3.75-$5.00), “depending on which area and things like that.” The same month as the cutting normally takes place, “which is the end of November, is when people do the planting, so they use the money to buy the seeds, to buy fertilizers, to even dig their farms, so they’ll be able to plant some food for the following year.”

“So now what came to my mind is you know if these people drop this what next are they going to do, you know if they are to see a sense in their life. Because of course if they were getting money to buy seeds and fertilizers, [that money] is something that was helping many people in the family and even in their community.”

So, she looked again at the whole system, and the economics of the region, and provided economic incentives for the women to drop their knives. “In that community the housing situation is not very good. So I thought maybe approaching it through housing would also help them.” Ultimately, Helen put together a proposal to get a machine for creating building bocks, and trained the women to make building blocks so that they could sell or build with the blocks they could now make.

Women become Watchdogs:

In each successive seminar, the attendees of the previous one recruited other colleagues in the world of genital cutting services. At the second seminar, a higher percentage but still around only 50% of the participants were “fully convinced,” dropped their blades, and stuck with the program, at which point the number totaled 16. So it continued until they managed to have a solid group of 24 former “traditional surgeons” who formed their own group.

These women become the watchdogs, because they know the tactics of arranging illicit ceremonies (they had only recently been doing the same). These watchdogs might hear there is a ceremony to be held, or that a traditional cutter is on their way to perform a cut, and they would act fast to inform Rotich and the authorities. The watchdog system has helped Rotich and her anti-FGM colleagues stage a number of stings, and stop a number of cuts, but the system poses its own challenges. The largest, Rotich says, is that getting the information to the right person is difficult in and of itself – movement in rural Kenya is costly and arduous, and so a person might have to reach somewhere very far to pass on the information. These women often do not even want to use the phone because “[this is] not information that they would give openly because otherwise they will risk to be cast out of the community that they are fighting the cultural norms of.”

Helen also wanted to help these women to rise above their previous quality of life, and she tried to lift these women up beyond just having them give up female genital cutting. Many of the women were uneducated, so she would help them go back and learn a little something, even how to write their names. “And I was very happy because some… they cannot put their thumbs to press their signature, now they can write their names,” she recalls.

Over the next couple of days, I want to highlight the work of Kenyan women’s activist Helen Tapelei Rotich, featured in the youtube clip above discussing her own circumcision. Helen is a fantastic example of a Kenyan woman taking innovative and “homegrown” approaches to eliminating the practice of FGM. In the past ten years she has used secret networks of women who were formerly paid to perform female circumcisions and male community leaders to make extraordinary headway in the battle against FGM in her Kipsigis (a tribe) community in Bomet county. (note: Helen is not Maasai, but I believe that we are all fighting the same battle and have something to learn from each other’s successes).

“The reason I do this is because when I was young I really went through many things that when I look back many times I have tears running down my cheeks,” Helen recalls, quivering with emotion. At first Helen refused to be circumcised and her father allowed her to go through high school uncut, but because all of her potential suitors who came to negotiate for her marriage were not educated or came from the kinds of families brewing illicit drinks and products, she cracked under the pressure. She says she finally looked at her situation, and realized “I will not be able even to survive in the community … without going through the women’s cut.” Although she tried running away, “during those days nobody would even accommodate you because everybody is for it, so I didn’t see where I could run to.” What she wanted for herself was irrelevant; “unfortunately there is the community, and everybody thinks you should do what everybody else in the community is doing so that you are accepted.” She finally gave in and was given out for marriage, but she is proud that at least she was over 18 by the time she became a wife.

Even after being married against her will, Helen didn’t give up. She continued to get training with an eye to helping her community, including training in counseling psychology to help girls she saw around her who had been traumatized by FGM. In 2001 she left her job and decided to start being an activist “in relation to female genital mutilation” in Bomet.

“It was quite a difficult thing to begin with because in the community, which is the Kipsigis community, it would not be very easy for a woman to stand before men, before a crowd, and to speak. You know, the culture. So unless you are only speaking to women…but I knew, if I approached it only through women then again it would not be so easy because the women don’t marry themselves, it has to be they are married to men…..I said I think I’d better approach it in another way so it can be listened to.”

So, in coordination with the Women’s Federation for World Peace and the Maendeleo Ya Wanawake Organization, she began an Anti-Feminine Genital Mutilation program, that targeted male leaders, women circumcisers, and youth. I’ll write more in detail about these programs in the next couple of days.

Helen says that female genital cutting has largely died out in her Kipsigis community of Bomet, but there is the ongoing challenge that the neighboring communities still practice FGC (they are surrounded by two different Maasai communities, in Narok and Transmara). As she sees it, the most intractable part of female circumcision in this general area is that some girls really want to be married young because they don’t have school fees to continue with their education, and in order to be married they feel they need to be circumcised.

I admire her work because she recognizes that eliminating the practice requires rethinking the approach. She sees a system that is conducive to FGM, and is combating it by strategically educating not just one sector but each critical level of that system. This is a trend among the most effective agents for change here – they are learning from the experience of the traditional institutions (churches and the law) and breaking down walls in completely new ways.

“Part of my work is fighting for women’s rights and making sure that women get a place, and this starts from girls.”

I met Helen Rotich because someone recommended we invite her to facilitate at our April summer camp, where she led a number of engaging and powerful sessions on FGM, teamwork, and leadership. A former secretary (a career that was almost never heard of for a women in her area at the time she chose it), Helen now serves as the county chairperson for the Naendeleo Ya Wanawake (Women’s Development) organization in Bomet county.

Women work together to clean the August maize harvest

How high are these prices, exactly? Literally every staple is costlier than when I arrived, and the #1 staple, white maize, is at 200% of last year’s price.

Changes in the cost of staple items since this time last year:

• maize: 2000 shillings/bag → 4000 shillings/bag (the school goes through 3 bags a week!)
• milk: 20 shillings/Litre → 40 shillings/Litre (not because there is a shortage, but because the producers went on strike so that they would get get a high enough price to be able to afford to buy maize to feed their families!)
• beans: 100 shillings/tin  → 150 shillings/tin (the school goes through 4 tins a day)
• sugar: 100 shillings/kilo → 150 shillings/kilo
• bread: 40 shillings/loaf → 50 shillings/loaf
• cooking oil: 150 shillings/Litre → 200 shillings/Litre
• salt: 10 shillings/packet → 15 shillings/packet
• soap: 80 shillings/bar → 100 shillings/bar
• rice: 70 shillings/ kilo → 110 shillings/kilo

Maize market in Kilgoris town, Transmara West District

When I go to the market, it blows my mind how at least one of these prices rises every single day. Because the price of each staple is related to the price of the others, when one goes up the whole system seems to become a little more over stretched, ratcheting up  prices to record levels.

Rising food costs combined with corrupt and obstructive governance and the worst drought in 60 years are creating a terrifying storm of humanitarian need all over the horn of Africa. In Kenya, there is a brewing but less noticed hunger crisis (and not only in the drought-affected northern areas). This CNN World article explains that prices in Kenya have risen faster than the global levels, and that Kenya’s problems have “been exacerbated by other factors, such as high fuel costs to transport food, the weak Kenyan shilling and maize export bans by neighboring countries” such as Tanzania, which recently imposed its own maize export ban to preserve domestic food security. In addition, because of the drought in the north, there is simply less food, and much of what little remains is being bought up to improve food security in the north.

With skyrocketing, unmanageable food prices, sometimes the price of feeding the family is foregoing education. In my last post, I explained Kenya’s summer-school like tradition of “tuition.” All around Enoosaen, however, I see children who should be in school playing in the streets or helping their parents with the small family restaurant or business, and several people have told me that this season in particular, exceptionally few families can afford to both feed their families and send their children to school with the the $2.00-$5.00 tuition school fee. It is not hard to understand, but it is a cruel reality that education loses out when struggling to provide basic survival needs.

And when the new semester starts on September 5th, school fees everywhere (especially at the all important boarding schools!) will be raised, and children whose parents already don’t care for education are becoming even more vulnerable to being taken out of school for lack of ability to pay. We too are feeling the costs at the Enkakenya Centre for Excellence, and Kakenya is trying to raise money specifically to cover the rising food costs, instead of passing the burden onto the families – we will try to do everything we can to keep this crisis from affecting our girls.

Drying recently harvested maize in Enoosaen center. On top of everything, as Mama Kakenya puts it, "the poor are getting poorer" because without a financial security blanket, they are forced to sell their maize during the marginally lower prices of market saturated harvest time (now), rather than wait for the prices to rise again in a few weeks.

Why am I worthy?

We are wrapping up our second of three weeks of “Tuition” period at the Enkakenya Centre for Excellence. The girls are technically on their August holiday from school, but in Kenya it is widely accepted that the April and August holidays are meant to include a couple extra weeks of remedial and catch up work – a sort of summer school, if you will. This time around, the Kakenya’s Dream organization is using an entirely separate set of motivated and qualified teaching staff to run an intensive remedial tutoring program. Most of the teachers we would normally have in the school are pursuing continuing education degrees during the holiday, and the government teachers are not accustomed to working during the holidays, so it made sense for the organization to step in and take advantage of the opportunity to give an extra enrichment program during tuition. This leaves me in charge (ha!), and a lot of room for innovation!

I have asked the new teachers to bring as many progressive techniques into the classroom as possible, and to promote the creative and critical thinking that is sometimes lacking in the normal curriculum (because these aren’t skills that are considered helpful for the girls perform on their end of primary school exams). These teachers have been recruited from as far as far western Kenya, and many have a variety of volunteer experience with community based organizations. The teachers are really impressing me and working around the clock – they make things run so smoothly it is as if the program is running itself. It might be helping that we have a full time teaching position open at the school and that they are all potential candidates…

There are a couple of things I love about tuition. The first is that we can use the extra class time to target problem areas for girls who have come into the school very behind academically, especially in English. These tend to be the girls we have accepted on the basis of their vulnerability (poverty, lack of familial support for education, etc.). The second is that we have time for awesome and unusual activities like the spelling bee we are hosting this weekend. I adore words, and am pretty stoked about the girls running around studying their english spelling lists! More on this later.

The third is that we have the chance to bring in leadership classes (in the future, these will be a part of the normal school activities, but we are still working on the final curriculum). Each class is having 2 hours of leadership and empowerment workshop every week, and the girls absolutely love it. For the first week, we had some visitors from the U.S. here volunteering at the school, so I put them to the task (thanks, Ellyn, Onalie, and co.!). I have also brought in a friend of mine, Caroline Ojwaya, who is a teacher at the St. Josephs school in Kilgoris (a nearby school where they support a very large number of girls rescued from forced marriages and circumcisions). She does a lot of work with girls’ empowerment and volunteers to run the Arid Lands Rural Development peer educators program. She is just an overall feisty and empowered lady, and I thought she would be perfect to run our program.

Working on Self Esteem - this activity shows how easy it is to tear a person down, but how difficult it can be to build them back up again.

Caroline Ojwaya, Leadership trainer

So far, she has brought incredible and nurturing energy to the classroom, and some very participatory lessons on self awareness and self esteem. The self esteem activity was my favorite – it involved tearing paper upon hearing negative statements to show how easy it is to tear a person down, but how difficult it can be to build them back up again. Even more exciting: this morning the girls told me that when some boys hissed at them from the road as they were carrying water, they thought about what Madam Caroline told them, kept their chins high, and told the boys, “there are no dogs here.” Music to my ears.

Music that empowers: Learning a song about how to protect ourselves and "our private parts," a critical lesson for empowering young Maasai girls.

See anything ruining the view from the idyllic riverside property of the EnKakenya Centre for Excellence in the photo below? Sure the Transmara Sugar Company factory isn’t photogenic, but its worst impacts on the area are yet to be felt.

The Transmara Sugar Company factory, with its dirty smoke stack and life-sucking water pump dangerously close to the Enkakenya Centre for Excellence dormitory in the foreground.

The Transmara Sugar Company broke ground in 2010, and hopes to be operational by October this year. Most people in Enoosaen have high hopes for the benefits the factory might bring. The biggest pro-factory argument you hear on the streets and at the soda shops is that the factory will bring jobs to the area. Jobs mean more income, maybe more population, and therefore, it is assumed, some sort of miraculously speedy development in the town center and the region as a whole. Alas, having spoken with the factory owner yesterday it has become apparent that 25% or less of those jobs will be given to unskilled local laborers.

When I ask educated colleagues or villagers about the factory, the list of worries abounds. Of course the first thing they say is that there are some good things (jobs, money) that will come, but there is inevitably a pause and then a river of concerns about cane farming. Sugar has a pretty bad reputation in world history (the centerpiece of the slave trade? Contributor to the epidemic obesity and diabetes?), and Kenya is no different. I am have zero expertise in agriculture, but I have a few hunches about the negative impact of concentrating on cash crops and a sugar monoculture. Cane is also notorious for stripping soil of its nutrients. I’ve expanded on several of the local problems with sugar cane in a list at the end of this post.

There was once an open community conversation about the potential negative effects (while deciding whether or not to accept the application to build the factory). At that meeting, one of the most educated (and wealthy) elder men of the town stood to speak his concerns about the factory taking advantage of the community, but his suggestions were rejected on the basis of the assumption that since he has money, he simply doesn’t want the others to have the opportunity to reap the financial gains.

The factory itself is owned by a wealthy Indian man named Mr. Shah, a Bombay native but 30+ year Kenyan resident. He answered to my concerns about the long term social and environmental impacts on the community by saying that they will consider offering financial education to their registered farmers, that they will possibly provide a few water taps outside of their factory, and that he even wants to build an orphanage nearby. But until we see these things, it is just talk, and other than the donation of some few building materials to the surrounding schools, I’ve seen nothing yet that leads me to believe he will follow through.

Owner, Mr. Shah

This factory has taken a lot of investment and important people have big stakes in its success. There doesn’t seem to be much anyone can do to stop it. The one way I see that we who recognize its perils can try to protect Enoosaen is education. I want to see the community be cognizant of what is happening to it, and vibrant debate is the first step to maintaining awareness. I am pushing for the teachers to bring the subject up in science and social studies classes and look at examples of similarly disasterous projects elsewhere. Here at the Enkakenya Centre for Excellence we can use it as an educational tool, and hope that the children go home and tell their parents.

Sugar factory in Kenya, made in India

Read on if you are interested in some of the problems with the culture of Cane!

Sugar is a known source of several evils:

1. Dangerous sums of money, and years between returns – On one hand, an acre of sugar cane can earn between a half to a million Kenya shillings, but a rural farming family who receives this payment rarely has the education or experience to tell them to save or manage this money. Harvests only happen every few years, so if a famly takes an expensive getaway and lives like royalty for a week, or if a husband goes straight to town to drink the harvest down to the last Tusker beer, the family will quickly be financially distraught. Conversely, the fact that a sugar harvest means big bucks is well known, and makes families who hve recently harvested a succulent target for thieves who may come after a family at their home at night, knowing the family will likely have wads of cash in the house. Some people have suggested that the Sony Sugar factory in nearby Awendo, a smaller scale operation, has sometimes seen almost daily robbings or killings for the money reaped from the cane sales of one of its farmers.

2. Food prices and cane vs. corn - People from all over the neighboring Nyanza province currently buy food, and especially maize (for the staple food, ugali) from this area. If sugar usurps the basic foods, the price of maize may rise even more than it already is (as a result of a general inflation in food prices we are currently experiencing here).

3. Financial trickery - Cane factories nearby have resulted in major negative financial and social effects on the local communities. Around the Mumias sugar factory, families have been leasing their land to the sugar factory on which the factory grows cane. Firstly, this means that the land may not be maintained to the standard at which a farmer would maintain his own land. Secondly, this means that families receive a payment for their land once and then are without land to cultivate for a period of years. Over those years, they lack the food and constant revenue that comes from cultivating land, and they most likely are bankrupt from not having had the skills to manage the large sum of money they might have received for the lease of their land. For that reason, or in order to purchase fertilizer for their cane, families may take out loans from the sugar company itself, and then with no other recourse to pay back their loans, several effectively end up as endentured laborers on their own land, working for the factory to pay back their loans. The Transmara Sugar Company is also proposing to lease land from around Keyian Division.

4. Environment - Lastly, several of us are gravely concerned about the environmental effects such as pollution (especially smoke and noise), and particularly the impact of the factory on the river that is Enoosaen’s primary water source. Transmara Sugar Company will be thoroughly cleaning the water he returns to the river after its cycle through the factory, but he will only return a minuscule fraction of the 400,000 litres (!!!) he will be extracting each day. It seems impossible to me that the river will have anything at all left to offer the residents downstream.

5. Land for cane means none for cows - There will certainly be a social impact, as the push to grow cane will completely interrupt the economy and food economy of the area, and the social structures surrounding them. More land for cane means less for cows to graze, and the cow is a central part not only of Maasai culture, but of how families manage through the hard times: the herd is the bank account. More income volatility means more volatile resources available for children’s school fees and books. And the more monolithic any one crop becomes, the more scarce is the knowledge of how to raise the varied, traditional, and useful other crops.

Recently, a reader asked about the punishment for circumcising a girl in Kenya, so are the basics of the legal mechanism for preventing and punishing female circumcision and early marriage.

Article 14 of the Children’s Act of 2001 states:

“No person shall subject a child to female circumcision, early marriage or other cultural rites, customs or traditional practices that are likely to negatively affect the child’s life, health, social welfare, dignity or physical or psychological development.”

Article 20 of the same law provides that the penalties for breaching the above are as follows:

“Notwithstanding penalties contained in any other law, where any person willfully or as a consequence of culpable negligence infringes any of the rights of a child as specified in sections 5 to 19, such person shall be liable upon summary conviction to a term of imprisonment not exceeding twelve months, or to a fine not exceeding fifty thousand shillings or to both such imprisonment and fine.”

One year in prison and a six hundred dollar fine for cutting off your daughter’s genitals by force and forcibly marrying her as a 13 year old. Is that punishment enough to deter? Not at all. The damage done to a girl through circumcision and forced marriage can be a lifetime challenge, a lifetime sentence, compared to the meager punishment for those who contravene the law.

There is a problem with the fact that these laws are implemented at the level of local governance, by chiefs, district officers, and district commissioners. These are political figures, and strictly enforcing the law is often not politically palatable. This is particularly true in the more rural or  less educated areas in which female circumcision and early marriage are rampant.

This means that the hands meant to be implementing the law are often twiddling their thumbs around the issue. One only need to recall Miriam (a girl who escaped her fate as a child bride) and how the D.O. was in cahoots with her parents and refused to help her, and it is clear that having the law on paper may not mean much in these areas.

In another twist, parents who try to marry  their children are much more vigorously pursued than those who try to circumcise their daughters. The Enoosaen location chief concedes that the law for preventing child marriage is much more strictly enforced than the law that is supposed to protect girls from circumcision, and says his has to do with a number of complicated reasons for which child marriage is less ingrained in the traditional culture. Overall, our chief genuinely believes that there is no reason for the law against FGM to be as strict as it is, and that is why authorities fail to enforce it. He says he believes in educating people, not punishing them, to get lasting change. This sounds reasonable at first, noble even, but at the end of the day it represents the feeling among the old guard of Maasai society that it just isn’t all  that bad to circumcise a girl. In his words, “after FGM, with some counseling, a girl will be okay….marriage is for life.”

Regardless of implementation, the law still fails to protect women over 18 years of age from forced marriage or circumcision. In addition, it is commonly understood that the law has driven female circumcision underground more than it has actually reduced it. Tragically, as a consequence of the law, some girls and their families even defer seeking necessary medical help when they have complications after the girl’s circumcision.

Counselor Caroline, an activist who helps girls escape early marriage and FGM, chafed at my suggestion that rescuing girls might be easier now that the law is on her side. “Sure in legal terms, but for the Maasai, it isn’t illegal. Maasai have their own law.”

Sincere thanks to expert Hellen Rotich, an invaluable resource on the subject, for her clarification on the legal protections for girls.