In this interview, Kakenya Ntaiya talks about the freedom she has found in education.  Tracing her path back to childhood, Kakenya remembers her family hardships and the constricting nature of traditional Maasai values on her future.  But Kakenya was not going to accept her family’s selection of a husband-to-be for her at age five; and she was certainly not going to let generations of ritual and multiple father-figures with a limited perception of her potential stand in the way of her own dream.  Instead, Kakenya - with the support of her mother - rallied together the very community that resented her independence and convinced them to send her to college in the US.  Now, less than a year away from finishing her PhD in international education, Kakenya is still dreaming - but this time, for her entire village.

Interview by: Kate Cummings. Location: Enoosaen, Kenya. Partner: Vital Voices, 2009.

We have made it.  This is a milestone.  We have matching, freshly starched uniforms for the thirty-one girls attending Kakenya’s School of Excellence.

School Uniform shop

Don’t be fooled by the manifestation of this baby-step in the revolution.  In fact, be convinced by it: with the simple gift of one plaid jumper, maroon sweater, pair of tan knee-socks, patent-leather shoes, and cream collared shirt, you will see each girl lengthen her spine to hold back her shoulders and smile with the confidence that she is, in fact, a miracle.  And I bet you some exorbitant amount of Kenyan shillings she will also do better in her studies - because it is clear someone is invested in her, and she is worth that investment.

Kakenya shows off her school's very own uniform

Beaming for her girls

Kakenya understood the gravity of this moment, and she was silenced by it (save this little clip just before her descent into disbelieving quiet).  She has completed one large orbit of her goal, one of the first rings of her Saturn.  This ring started with one fundraising event after another, visits to Vital Voices in DC, more and more time away from her son and husband, her dissertation; then it was a long trip last summer, another this February, and now one month back in her Kenyan home to see how the girls of her school - “her children” - are growing.  And during this packed month, Kakenya has taken an eight-hour matatu to the large town of Eldoret (“that’s too busy, like New York City”) and spent the whole day personally seeing to it that each girl has every piece of this elaborate outfit that leaves will eventually, on the dirt roads of Enoosaen town, leave all onlookers without a doubt in their minds: this girl is going somewhere.

Now, maybe,  you can see the multiplier effect behind the demure uniform Kakenya holds up in this short video.  You should have been there: adding rings to a planet is worth witnessing (and worth doing).

Video: Kate Cummings. Location: Eldoret, Kenya. Partner: Vital Voices

As the parents entered the gate to Kakenya’s school, I noticed the majority of them were fathers.  There were no couples, but plenty of men carrying their power sticks.  I was interested to talk with them, mothers and fathers, before the assembly began.  Here’s what a few parents had to say about the budding Center for Excellence and their daughters’ education:

Rhodah Chemonget

Rhodah Chemonget is 25 years old with 4 kids (2 of them girls).  Rhodah has one daughter attending Kakenya’s Center.

Q: Have you noticed improvements in your daughter since she started at this school?
Rhodah: She’s doing well. When she was in another school, she wasn’t concentrating on her work.  But now, when she gets home, she is always reading.  My other kids don’t read at home.

Q: How far did you go with your education?
Rhodah: I went to Class 5 [fifth grade].  I wanted to go farther, but my parents refused.  My life would have been better if I’d gotten more education.  But now, my life is hard.  If I’d gone to school, I’d be earning an income – not taking the donkeys to collect maize everyday.

Q: How do you want to raise your daughters differently than your parents raised you?
Rhodah: For a long time, fathers just wanted daughters to be married so they can get cows – but I, I want my daughters to go all the way with education.

Paul Murunka

Paul Murunka is 39 years old with 8 kids (5 of them girls)

Q: What are your expectations for your daughter at this Center of Excellence?
Paul: I am expecting my child to prosper in education.  This school will be different than others.  Judging from the title, “excellence”, and its good foundation, I know it will be an excellent school.

Q: Has your daughter changed since she started school here?
Paul: My daughter is improving.  She’s speaking in English, and also she’s not shy like she was before.  I want to see her being among the first in the class.

Q: Why do you want for your daughter to receive an education?
Paul: Culturally, girls aren’t supposed to inherit anything from the family.  I want, while I am alive, for my daughters to inherit an education from me.

Q: Is there anything else you want to say?
Paul: May God bless Kakenya, because she is not selfish.  She is making more Kakenyas here [gestures to the children playing in front of the school].

Christian Saleh

Christian Saleh is 33 years old with 3 kids (all of them girls – two attending Kakenya’s Center).  Christian was the only other girl in eighth grade w/Kakenya when they were at the end of primary school; all the other girls were dropping out to be circumcised and then married.

Q: Do you have expectations for your daughter at this school?
Christian: The aim I have is for my girls to finish school here and continue other studies.  I finished school up to Class 11 [eleventh grade] – I didn’t finish my schooling because I couldn’t pay the school fees.  I wish I had finished.

Q: Was it difficult to be the only other girl w/Kakenya in Class 8?  How do you want your daughter’s education to be different from your experience?
Christian: Sometimes the boys would beat us and we ran away from them.  Sometimes I had to stay at home to take care of the younger kids, the farm – I had to miss school sometimes to do work for my family.  I want my daughters to do well in exams and go farther than I did.  I don’t want my daughters to have to stay home and take care of the animals.

We arrived at the school for Parents Day, and found the girls  in their temporary schoolhouse, singing.  Through the shuttered windows, I could see them practicing their performances – call and response songs in Maasai, some memorized poems.  Outside, the teachers sat by the temporary office, preparing final exam grades so they could discuss each child’s progress with her parents.  This parents day is being held on the last day of the school term, before what would normally be a two-week break for the girls.  Because the school jut started in May, and the teachers are detecting some weakness in their math and English skills, they have decided to give the girls a three-day weekend and start again on Monday in an effort to catch up with their peers in other schools.

Over the next several hours, parents arrived at the casual pace that Kenyans attend scheduled events.  In the meantime, Luna and I played with the girls; we taught them one song after another and after they aptly learned the words they would scream, “another!” and so we rummaged with haste through our forgotten days of summer camp assemblies and campfire games.  I taught an unusually vocal session of yoga, giving each of the movements an animal sound to help the girls understand the positions (“downward dog – bark like a puppy!” “Woof woof woof” went the chorus; “now cat tuck pose, roar like a lion” – “ROAR!” went the fierce pride).  Luna has been teaching the girls Taekwondo whenever we have free time with them; by now, the girls have shirked their timid gestures and meek yells for the sharp “yah!” they throw with their nimble kicks.  There’s also the favorite pastime of touching my hair and face; there seems to be no end to the surprise of my uncurled hair and light skin – the girls have to touch my head and arms to believe it.  “Our Mom is so preeeetty!” They yelp with excitement, small fingers tracing my neck and eyelids.  And as sweet and touching as the love-session is, it can be overwhelming (see the picture below):

Taekwondo with the girls

Daily loving from the girls

When more than half of the parents had arrived, we all migrated to the unfinished classroom in the official Center for Excellence.  The school building is more than halfway finished, and will be the first two-story building in town when it is completed.  This is, already, a source of pride for everyone involved in the school.  The parents squeezed their knees under the small desks, sitting with bodies craned forward in anticipation – women in the center rows, men entirely separate in the row by the windows.  The girls came in and, with the signal from their teachers, formed lines in front of us.  Kakenya’s youngest sister, Nashipay, led the girls in a traditional Maasai song – all of them jumping down to the floor and springing up to the rhythm of the song.  After their performance, the girls listened along with their parents as the teachers talk of overall performance in the three months since school opened.  “Overall,” Madam Lydia said, “the girls are getting higher marks than they were in their initial exams.  They are also speaking only English in the classroom – if any student is overheard talking in her mother-tongue, she has to wear a necklace made of cow bones!” The girls laughed from their seats, hiding their heads in each others’ sweaters.  When they first started at this school, almost all of the students spoke no English; only a few months in, they understand all that Luna and I say to them, and can reply quickly with annunciation better than most Americans.

Proud mothers

Students watching the assembly

Parents and children - all are students

Some parents stood up and spoke passionately about the importance of their daughters’ education – the fathers taking the lead.  They emphasized cleanliness and the need for new uniforms so the girls could have more confidence in themselves.  Good grades were acknowledged and higher marks were expected – said fathers and mothers, directing their eyes at the girls.  In my nearly ten weeks in Kenya, I’ve noticed that Kenyans are talented orators and talented promisers: they vow to make certain changes, and the passion of their promise sometimes outweighs the action taken.  At the end of this meeting, what I’d come to expect was not what in fact happened.

Father gives a speech at Parents Day

Kakenya stood in front of the parents, expressing her gratitude for everyone’s support and for the girls’ hard work.  At the end of her talk, she mentioned that the school would be open for the holiday, unlike neighboring primary schools, and they would need donations for food during these two weeks.  And within ten minutes (okay, maybe 20), the parents had completely taken care of it.  “I can bring 5 kilos of sugar!” shouts the mother with the polka-dot cape; “I have 10 kilos of maize”, yells the father in the tan suit.  And like this, every child’s snack and lunch were accounted for.  Kakenya was impressed, and so was I.  “Wow, these parents!” She said afterwards, as we all sat on the lawn with our lunch of beans and rice. “They are really committed.  I guess I can call on them more often.”  And in just one day, she did – one of the fathers (one that I interview in the next blog, Paul Murunka) offered to travel to Kisii with us the next day (a town about 2 hours away) to handle the negotiations of ordering construction materials.  And only a few days later, one of the mothers – who has traveled very little outside of Enoosaen – volunteered to join us on the long seven-hour journey to Eldoret to collect the girls’ new uniforms.  Where there is support from parents – we all know because of lack or abundance in our own lives – a child’s chances for happiness and success increase exponentially.  It seems that Kakenya has, in her unfinished classroom of parents and children, what it takes to have a true Center for Excellence.

Kakenya addresses the parents

Kakenya got off the phone, shaking her head.  “Some bad news today.”  She stood up, then sat down again.  “One of the girls from my school – her teachers say she has been sitting in class with a blank stare, she jumps suddenly sometimes, closes her body up.  They think she’s been raped.”  How old?  I asked.  “Maybe nine.”  Who did it?  “They think it was a relative. “ What?  “Yeah,” Kakenya looks down, frowning.  “She was visiting her mother’s relatives in another area – they think it happened then.  Maybe an uncle.”  Kakenya looked up quickly, her braids flying back.  “I want to know that man so I can beat him myself.”

The next day we were in the yard, some chickens around our feet and freshly picked tomatoes piled nearby.  Kakenya started yelling to a voice behind the fence – come!  There was a yelp and then a girl, bright and running, appeared in the dirt drive.  “This is the girl – she lives just next door,” Kakenya said.  The girl leapt over stones, lithe and tall, her head shaved and her school uniform hanging loose on her frame as she moved without stopping into Kakenya, burying her face and laughter in her dress.  With both hands on the child’s head, Kakenya spoke softly, smiling down at the girl’s crown.  “How is school?  You’ve been working hard?”  The girl nodded with head tilted sideways, her eyes lit up.  Her embarrassment increased by the moment, so much attention, and she returned her face to Kakenya’s stomach.  “Have you been sick?”  Kakenya tapped the girl’s chin.  The girl shook her head.  “Because I hear you missed some school – you were not sick?”  The girl is quiet, her head movements less noticeable.  “We will talk, just you and me.  Come on Saturday?”  The girl looks up – yes, her head nods.

Young girls of Enoosaen

“I don’t know how to counsel a girl about this.”  Kakenya was sitting in the living room, elbows resting on her knees.  Since the girl’s visit, she had been noticeably distracted. “What if she cries?”  I think that would be good – I said.  That Saturday, during the purple in-between time of sunset and nightfall, the girl came back.  She was quieter.  The two of them retreated to one of the grassy hillocks near the edge of the farm.  Kakenya asked the girl to tell her what she remembered and, resting her body against Kakenya’s, she started slowly:

It was daytime.  I was alone in the house.  An older man, he touched me.  When I see men now, I think they are coming to get me.  They will do the same thing.  Sometimes when I am in class, I remember, and my body gets so tight.  I couldn’t see for two days [she went blind from the trauma].  I hear a ringing in my ears that lasts the whole day.

Kakenya could feel the girl’s heart beating rapidly, the muscles of her jaw, arms, thighs like taut rope.  She gave the girl a diary for writing.  “Whenever I am not here, write down what you want to say.”

I saw her the next day in school.  We came to visit the students, and play a few games.  I taught them a song, and watched the girl as she bumped shoulders with her classmates, eagerly mimicking my hand motions and tones just like them.  We repeated the melody, molding our hands into flowers, mountains – and in between the mountains and the hills, the girl dropped her hands, an almost imperceptible cloud covering her eyes.  She bowed her head, and passively moved her body out of the crush of students.

There is no healing ceremony for rape in the Maasai tribe, despite how often it occurs. What is present and too common is women and men’s reaction: “This is the girl’s fault”.  To hear rumor of this response sets fire to the disbelieving heart.  But to put your hands on the head of a nine year-old child, to see her eyes still remarkably bright, and to know that she is the one that mothers, brothers, fathers are blaming for a grown man’s brutality – this is enough to break even the observer.  I, like Kakenya, want to beat this man.  I want my anger to become a swarming force of violence that surrounds him in his home and tears apart any piece of him he thought was good.  And then I want her to know, this small girl, that she is perfect again.

School girls

“All I want to do is see my girls.  Are we going to make it?  Oh look, it’s already past four.”  Kakenya is pointing from the window of the car at the school children, running in their uniforms along the roadside.  School has just let out and children are chasing skipping darting everywhere, unattended, on their long walks back home.  We pull into Kakenya’s hometown of Enoosaen and quickly leave the rows of shops for a dirt road leading into the hills.  The car lets us out and Kakenya is walking fast, her excitement building as we see the sign, “Kakenya’s Center for Excellence.”  And just as we have the driveway in our sights, a flood of girls comes around the fenced corner.  There are so many of them, their dresses different colors and patterns – some bright pink, others brown-and-white checks, a few with green collars peeping out from torn sweaters.  Their small bodies stretch over the earth like track sprinters, hugging the twists in the path as they close in on us.  From only a few feet away, their smiles are wild – huge and full of joyful screaming; Kakenya is waiting, her arms open, and all of the delicate frames in bright colors come rushing into her, hugging one another when they cannot reach Kakenya.  I became, in a matter of seconds, completely devoted to these girls.  Their goodness was so clear, whole; the world should belong to them.

Kakenya's welcome

It takes actually very little information to know someone.   It takes only, for example, the abandon in the girls’ sprint to know them.  It takes just the size and grip of the embrace that surrounded Kakenya to know Kakenya’s Center for Excellence.  And it took only one moment of looking at Kakenya, surrounded by the uncontained love of her students, to know that Kakenya is exactly the person you have always hoped for.

Kakenya's School of Excellence students

The Center was officially begun the groundbreaking ceremony last summer, and thirty-one girls started filling the classroom a year later in May, 2009.  The school is unique in many ways – offering the first primary boarding school in the district, leadership training that empowers the girls to speak and present themselves with confidence, and Kakenya hopes that soon there will be summer leadership camps that open up the opportunities of the school’s leadership training to other girls in the region who are not boarders.  Kakenya also wants to plant corn and other vegetables on school property so the students can have their own supply of food (and training in agricultural practices).

The girls at the Center are between eight and fourteen, and many of them are among the most underprivileged girls in Transmara district.  Many of them are at risk of early marriage, female genital mutilation, and a life governed by poverty (like many of their parents).  Presently, the school is still under construction, and the girls are going to class in a nearby building made of aluminum sheeting.  The dormitories have not yet been built, but the district’s Member of Parliament has contributed the funds for its construction.  Many of the girls walk over two hours to school each day, alone, on isolated roads in the hills.  It goes without saying that the completion of the dormitories will make the lives of the girls immeasurably more safe and stable.

Impromptu assembly

The girls seem unaffected by their temporary learning center, but Kakenya is pained to see the two-story school incomplete and her students without the amenities she anticipated.  “You see their outfits?  All of the holes in the dresses and the sweaters?  We have got to get their uniforms before I leave!”  We are at an assembly in the open field with the scaffolded school building.  The girls are singing songs of welcome, answering Kakenya’s questions in unison “Are you studying hard?”  “Yes!” “Are you treating each other like sisters?”  “Yes!” The two teachers, Madame Lydia and Madame Margaret, stand proudly behind their pupils, encouraging some girls to speak up and others to straighten their bodies instead of slumping away in shyness.  There is nothing sleepy or sedentary about these children, which is more than I can say from my days working in America’s public school system.  They are poised for instruction, eager to be – of all things – polite; for this American, the brightness of these attentive faces is the most miraculous outcome of Kakenya’s Center.

Kakenya's children

And, unlike Kakenya, these girls have a role model for another kind of future – Kakenya herself.  “If I had a woman to look up to when I was a girl,” Kakenya says, “I wouldn’t have had to struggle so much by myself.”  Kakenya is an ideal model: tall and graceful, respectful of her community elders and boldly insistent on adjusting cultural norms that subjugate girls and women.  The students affectionately address Kakenya as their mother, and all of them are clearly her children.  “Look at my girls,” Kakenya leans over and whispers.  “Aren’t they perfect?” And if only you were here to see, you would agree: they are, unequivocally, perfect.

A different future

Postscript: I am writing to you from the nurses station at Enoosaen’s maternity ward.  This is one of the only places in town where electricity, when you’re lucky, is available.  When I come out of the room periodically and look across the hall, there is often a woman who is just about to, is in the process of, or has just gone through having a baby.  Today when I come out, I see a young girl on the table.  There is only a thin sheet for a doorway, and I catch a glimpse of her face laying sideways on the torn mat of the table.  My friend Lillian, the attending clinician, comes out from behind the curtain.  “She is just about to give birth.”  I nod, still craning my neck around to the open door.  “Do you know?  She is fourteen and she has already been cut (had female genital mutilation).  She is unmarried, so any man that marries her from here will treat her like” and Lillian flicks her hand to the ground, “nothing.  Now,” she looks hard at me, and I bring my eyes back from the doorway to meet hers.  “her education is over.”  She invites me to watch the birth, and I quickly refuse.  As I am typing this to you, the cries of the newborn are audible through the door.  Another girl’s future has been decided.