Tribal Sisters (KENYA)

Female circumcision. Cut with a jagged edge of a knife, stick or rock and sutured with thorns, ankles binded by rope. Gruesome it may seem, this is seen as a way of economic security and a path to womanhood. To be circumcised qualifies a girl for marriage. For families it means that their daughters will be taken care of. It is a way of life.

When I was a junior in college my sociology professor assigned me the research topic of female circumcision. In my library I sat with diagrams of female anatomy wondering how to present an intimate subject to a classroom of strangers. I brought one visual aid—a poster board in which I pasted nine sets of rectangle pieces of red construction paper, punched holes in it and sewed them up with yarn. Behind each set of red doors was the face of a woman—faces cut from issues of National Geographic. I took a pair of scissors, slowly cutting down the sewn doors. I turned to the class. “Each of these women has undergone circumcision,” I began.

Ten years later I found myself in Kenya on a medical mission seven hours from Nairobi in a desert past the great rift valley and far from Mount Kilamanjaro with the nomadic pastoralist Pokot tribe, among men and boys carrying bows and arrows, and women with dreadlock hair that glistened with goat fat and red earth. They wore beaded rings around their neck, each ring of beads marked a rite; circumcision, marriage, birth. Here, wealth is determined by herds of goats, cattle and camels.

I did not know how closely my life would touch female circumcision until I was in one of the villages and a young man decided that he liked the muzungu from Hawaii. His mother made an offer for my bride price. It was proposed that his family would pay 40 goats, 20 cows, and 5 camels for me to be his second wife.

“But you have to get circumcised,” his mother told me.

I told her that I was very honored but declined the offer to get circumcised.

Our stamina and tempers baked in the oven of the desert. We worked in 114 degrees, ran out of water, ran short of food, and slept in the equivalent of a chicken shed, a box of a room without windows and an aluminum roof that heated up during the day, with chickens and goats running and pecking at our door.

The medical mission coordinator, a self-proclaimed leader in humanitarian relief missions hid our provisions of canned tuna, granola bars, and crystal light lemonade in his backpack. He kept himself busy with photo opportunities and political negotiations for his personal fundraising efforts while the rest of us worked.

My job was to clean bloody instruments used by the dentist to perform tooth extractions. For thirteen hours a day, sitting on a rock and using a tree stump for my table, I soaked, disinfected, and wiped clean the shiny metal instruments brought from Spain. There was no clinic where we worked. Only grazing camels, dried up river beds, and snakes.

Several times I thought about dying in the bush among funnels of dust storms, thorny bushes, and wide-eyed vultures. Never being found, my life cut short at the mercy of a twisted ego.

Life was not ready to give up on me. The unpredictable, unforeseen duality of humanitarian work. It was in the desert on that trip that I met Kiyapyap in one of the villages where we were volunteering. A slender girl with eyes that radiated and skin the color of dark chocolate, I learned that she was eleven years old and was living at a local primary school having run away from getting circumcised and early marriage. Kiyapyap stood out from her crowd of classmates and told me “I want to be a teacher, when I grow up.” Potential and determination are not timid. They wear themselves like buttons on a coat. I saw a leader in Kiyapyap and realized at that moment, why I had come to Pokot. Not one to make promises in the field, I told Kiyapyap that I would inquire about how to help her.

One that same trip, I met an anthropologist who was doing fieldwork for his doctoral studies on conflict among nomadic pastoralists. He gave me a lift in a beat-up white truck at 7 a.m. on a bumpy dusty road forty miles from our chicken shed in an attempt to see if I could reception from a "high point" in the desert on my international mobile to let my family know that the medical mission was run by a fraud. Not one bar of signal showed on my phone and I resigned myself to the fact that we were in the middle of nowhere with a madman. It would be my silence and my prayers that would keep me alive.

The anthropologist began to explain to me the dynamics of wealth among the Pokot. “You see that pen over there?” He pointed to a family hut with a fence with more than forty goats. “They are fairly well off. If a family has five goats, they are struggling.” I learned that currency is measured in terms of livestock. Fights occur when someone takes your goats—it is a measure of the value of your property. I also learned that in an arid place like Pokot if there are no boreholes for water, it is common to drink goat milk and the blood of cattle.

When I returned from Kenya, I contacted the anthropologist and told him about Kiyapyap to see if there was a possibility of helping her with her schooling. The anthropologist connected me to a Catholic Father who worked at a mission in the bush about 200 km away from Kiyapyap’s family. The Catholic Father paid a visit to the headmistress of a boarding school in the nearest city about four hours away, explaining the unusual situation of the girls and gained admission for secondary school for Kiyapyap and another Pokot girl, Kadogo to enter secondary school. He sought the permission of both sets of parents. It was the first time the girls had ever traveled in a vehicle, the first time they had worn shoes on their feet, and their first glimpse of a more developed world outside their communities. When they arrived at the school, all the students stood outside to welcome them.

On Kenyatta Day--October 21st, my mother and I were reunited with Kiyapyap and Kadogo, nearly two years after they began boarding school. Dressed in white and blue checkered uniform dress with a regal blue sweater, Kiyapyap embraced me and did not let go. Kadogo shyly hugged mom. We sat staring and smiling at each other. There are no words. They are my younger sisters and I love them as my own.

We spent time teaching the girls Scrabble, a game that my grandmama played with me from the time I was a child. It gave the girls an opportunity to practice their English. It was astonishing because not only did they have to think a different language, they had to spell and strategize about where to put the tiles on the board.

We took the girls on an excursion to an animal orphanage. I’m sure the girls were used to seeing some of the animals in their lives in Pokot. We took Kiyapyap and Kadogo for the second ice-cream of their life. We shared pictures of my brother and sister and a few photos from back home in Hawaii. Taking Kiyapyap’s hand in mine, I asked.

“How many siblings do you have?”

“Five sisters and three brothers.”

“How many goats does your family have?”

“Fifteen,” she smiled.

Kiyapyap’s father died when she was a child. Her mother became inherited by her uncle and this formed a new family.

“You still want to be a teacher?” I asked.

“I want to be a headmistress!”

Kadogo, quiet and reserved said she had three sisters and two brothers. Her mother did not remarry. (She refused to be inherited). Her family had twenty goats and times were difficult. Kadogo wants to be a doctor.

I asked both girls what they did before they went to school in the village. They walked 15 km to gather firewood, 20 km to gather water, they helped build their family house from sticks and mud and they looked after their younger siblings at the age of ten.

I asked the Catholic Father how he addressed the sensitive issue of female circumcision with the parents. “I told them that if they circumcised their daughters, the education would stop.” Father then explained to us---that parents really care for their daughters. They don’t want to harm them but this is something that is cultural, the society expects it and the parents feel obliged. He also explained that parents realized the opportunity for an education. Most girls don’t have the chance to complete secondary and higher education because families can’t afford books and uniforms.

The Catholic Father showed us pictures on his laptop of the time that he brought the girls’ mothers to the school campus for a visit. In one of the photos Kiyapyap's mother cradled her baby brother in one hand and held a vessel made from the stomach of a goat in the other. “Her mother brought her fresh goat milk as a treat!” the Catholic Father announced.

I turned to the girls and made a request: “My little sisters, never forget where you come from. It is who you are. You will learn many things in the school and meet girls from different areas-- Mombassa, Kisumu, and Nairobi, but never forget who you are. You have a chance to be an example for other Pokot girls.”

Change begins with one life at a time. In a school of 500 girls Kiyapyap and Kadogo are the only two from the Pokot tribe. They are the first to represent their tribe in a school of higher education.

Abel's Journey (ETHIOPIA)

mom with abel

The gates of St. Mary’s Language School were slightly ajar. We pushed our way in treading lightly under the dim gray-white of the street light and holding the hand of my unsteady mother, setting foot on larger stones to avoid falling into the deep holes in the ground. We came to visit Abel Ayelew. The roots of trees slithered across the soil. Past the roots and around the corner were steps to climb with a drop off to several feet and no handrail. Finally we came to yellow wooden door with the number 12.

Now I would spare you the details, but I want you to imagine walking to door #12 completely blind. Abel is 16 years old and came to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia on a bus from his town of Gojjam 300 kilometers away. He came to the city, on his own, without anything determined to find a school that taught Braille.

How did we meet Abel? On our last visit to Ethiopia we were on our way home from a visit with an HIV affected family. (People here do not say HIV, they say “The Virus” in a whisper). As we were driving my mother saw a boy with a cane and his teenage friends swaggering down the street.

Mom said “WAIT! Stop the car.” She got out and embraced him in a big hug. I sat thinking, my mom is nuts. We had stopped the car in the middle of a dirt road in a community unknown to us surrounded by corrugated aluminum roofs and mud houses held together with hay. Dusk was arriving.

Abel had two white moons in his eyes, they were cloudy. He was completely blind. I got out of the car and took Abel’s hands. I took both of his hands and held them in mine. “Love is not something you have to see, you can feel it,” I said.

He squeezed my hands back and said, “I feel it.”

That was a year and a half ago and Abel spoke the local language of Amharic. His swagering teenage friends were our interpreters.

That love transcended the miles and oceans between Africa, Boston, and Hawaii. Over the months we sent emails to each other. Abel would go to an internet café and ask the waitress to help him type an email.

Abel’s dream was to learn English and become an advocate, a lawyer. With the help of the NGO Hope for Children Organization, Abel registered at St. Mary’s to study English five days a week. He attends high school classes during the day and English class at night, the youngest pupil in his class. How he walks everywhere and knows the distances between places, is beyond me.

When I met him earlier in the day he was carrying a few sheets of heavy white paper, our emails from over a year ago and a black folder that had holes in it. Then he put his hand in his pocket. “This is my pen!" he smirked as if he could see my reaction to the short, conical instrument, a fourth of a normal pen's size. It had a metal pin which he would stick through the holes of his folder to spell things out in Braille. Dot by dot.

Abel turned to me. “It is a difficult learning system for a disabled person. For example, there is a lack of Braille paper. It is very expensive. There are no Braille books…and I live alone.”

Abel saves his Braille paper for his exams. He has a professor who is blind at his local school. Abel listens to the exam questions and writes his answers in Braille. His teacher grades his examinations in Braille.

“How do you take notes?” I asked him.

“I listen.” He grinned.

“But how do you remember everything, if you can’t write it down?”

“I catch it on my brain.” His grin became two dimples.

Tonight we made a surprise visit to Abel’s English class to thank his teacher. There were 30 students sitting at old wooden benches about seven students squashed into a bench barely any space between them.

My mom who manages to find a flower to put in her hair no matter what country we’re in had tucked a fuschia bougainvillea behind her ear and was wearing a Hawaiian mu’umu’u dress. She opened with “Hello everyone. I am here to visit my son’s English class.”

The room was silent, but you could hear the joy. Then mom said, “My Abel, you are seated next to two beautiful women! How did you manage that? ” The classroom roared with laughter.

I introduced myself and said I was from Hawaii. “But you look Ethiopian,” someone in the back responded.

We laughed, asked and answered questions, and --I danced a short Hawaiian hula for everyone. I enjoy sharing Aloha.

Someone raised their hand and asked the question: “What is the difference between Ethiopia and America?”

“The Ethiopians have an open heart and wear their soul on the outside,” mother said.

Abel closed the class thanking the teacher and saying how happy he was to have this opportunity. Abel wears his soul and it is cloaked in the vision of his dreams. His courage as tall as the mountains.

The Wish (ETHIOPIA)

On the road to Addis University, before the roundabout circle, past the Yesus Drug Store, and a boy charging people to weigh themselves on an industrial food scale, we found our friend Eshetu; a 22 year old man who is disabled from the waist down. His name derived from the Amharic Eshet—the silk threads that protect an ear of corn. We met him as we were dropping off film at a roadside store.

Having a disability does not prevent Eshetu from working. Wearing a yellow fluorescent vest with orange reflector stripes, he works as a parking attendant dispensing tickets and collecting fees for parking, using two worn down wooden crutches for support and stability. We were taken with Eshetu because he wasn’t using his disability as an excuse to beg. When you witness someone who perseveres with life despite the social, physical, and psychological challenges—it is a tribute to the strength of the human spirit.

We made arrangements to take Eshetu to the NGO to learn about his life. As we were driving in a 1980 mustard yellow Fiat with a thin tan line that outlined the body of the car, I attempted to roll down the window when the handle fell off. Ooops. We started laughing. Eshetu showed me the calluses and blisters on his fingers from where he gripped the handles of his crutches. I do not speak Amharic, but suffering is a universal language, as is joy.

We arrived at the blue-gray gates of Hope For Children greeted by a dog name Lucy, little girls in school uniforms of denim colored pinafores with sky blue blouses. A young man was waiting sitting on the concrete wall. He wouldn’t recognize me until I got closer, but I recognized him right away. My Abel. You will learn his story soon.

“My sister…It has been one year and six months since I met you.” Abel said. His white walking cane was folded in his hand. I smiled.

We sat facing the yellow memory boxes. Eshetu spoke Amharic and Abel was fairly good in English. Abel became my translator. Eshetu believed that he became crippled when he was given an “injection in his back as a child and had a bad reaction.” He came from the district Walloo, eight hours by bus and hadn’t been home to visit his family because he didn’t have the money.

I had been caught up in my note-taking when Abel asked me: “Where is his problem, because I can’t see?” Abel is completely blind. I explained that Eshetu did not have the use of his legs and that he was walking with sticks that were larger than the walking cane that Abel used. It is hard for me to describe to you—the feeling that wrapped around me, it was touching.

I asked Eshetu what he wanted to do with his life, what was his future plan. He was quiet. One of the staff members who was standing over my shoulder said, “He has not had time think of his future, he has been busy trying to live day to day.”

“What do you wish for, Eshetu?” I ask.

“I am 22 years; I did not have the chance to finish high school. My wish is to finish my last two years of school.”

Mom and I nodded to each other. I grasped Eshetu’s hand. “Many people have seen me. They have written articles in the newspaper about me. But no one has tried to help me,” Eshetu responded.

I continue to hold Eshetu’s hand. This symbolized more than going back to school. It represented a young man facing society and staring stigma down. If he can be an example, others can follow. That’s what it’s about. Creating possibility and gradually affecting change.

The first priority was getting Eshetu’s school papers and certificates which were back home in Waloo. There was no way to contact his family because they did not have phone. Eshetu was excited to surprise them.

It was the first time he would be home in three years.