Heart & Soul, October 2003

The music blaring from the Moonlight Hotel in Isinya, Kenya, is distinctly un-African: a mix of Bob Marley, Celine Dion, and old R&B. Men gathered in the front are drinking Tusker beers while in the courtyard, a group of ornately dressed Maasai women sit threading miniscule beads on to plain cotton thread. Sankoyan deftly scoops up a row of red beads on a needle and motions for me to do the same. She is teaching me to make a necklace, just a single strand, nothing quite as glorious as the vibrant collars around her neck.

We begin with the basics: names, ages and number of children. I have been married just over a year and am expecting my first baby; Sankoyan has been married since she was 15, about 19 years, and has seven children. She is beautiful, with smooth chestnut skin and a winning smile, and so her dowry was high: five cows. She laughs when she says this but then adds matter-of-factly: “I was just married off; I didn’t have a choice. It was my time to get married.”

I am experiencing a side of Africa that most people miss: the culture and pith of the people that make the continent so much more than the game parks far more frequently portrayed. My Kenyan safari did deliver the expected: herds of perfectly patterned zebra, skittish wildebeest and satiated lions lying hidden in the gold of the grass. But I also shared a typical tribal lunch of irio (mashed potatoes, peas and spinach) and stew with some Kikuyu women. I attempted (unsuccessfully!) to work a posho mill, used to grind maize into flour, and spent bittersweet moments in the meager 10 by 10 foot home of Gladys, a widow dying of AIDS.

The Women to Woman safari offered by Eco-Resorts offers visitors the opportunity to interact with their Kenyan counterparts. The 12 day trip includes visits to well-known game parks: Masai Mara, Samburu and Meru, but guests also meet with several different feminist groups, all working towards the common goal of bettering the lives of Kenyan women.

The safari begins with the drive to Isinya, an hour outside of Nairobi, to visit the Dupoto Women’s Group. These 25 Maasai women bead necklaces, dog collars and other trinkets that are then sold in the United States. The money earned grants them some financial independence from their husbands, but more importantly, allows them to educate their daughters. Maasai girls are typically circumcised and married off at puberty, often to a man many years their senior and in some cases with more than one wife. According to Maasai custom, the only way a girl can avoid early marriage is if she is in school. And so the Dupoto women bead to send their daughters to school.

I spent a morning with the Dupoto women, beading and bonding. They are surprisingly accepting of many aspects of their lives. Many like Mary Shanka, 50, and the second of three wives, take little issue with polygamy. “You cannot have just one wife,” she explains. “You need an assistant.” When I ask if they enjoy sex despite being circumcised, Mary says simply: “We don’t know the other side of the story, so we just think this is how it is.” But the women are also quietly defiant. They coyly explain that if you are married at a young age to an older man, you simply go out and find a “friend.” And 40-year old Leah, who left home because her husband beat her, returned resilient. Her family sent her back, albeit after three years, and when she arrived home to find her husband had taken a second wife, her demand was simple: “If you want me, the other one has to go.”

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As you climb the hills into the Kenya highlands, the land gets greener and the women, it is said, become bolder. The ladies in the Nyeri Upendo Women’s Group are Kikuyu, a tribe whose women are known for their strength and enterprising spirits. These are women who are rumored to rule, and even beat, their husbands. Most have jobs, tend their shambas (gardens) and take on additional work to make extra money. Many in the group are raising children alone because their husbands have left them.

“The man always claims to be head of the household,” Gladys, the chairwoman, sighs, “but there are those who are like decorations in the house, doing nothing. I say, if you want to eat, you have to work.” The 25 Upendo women do just that, making jewelry, clothing and sisal baskets that they sell at a nearby hotel and to friends and neighbors. Each woman pays $2.50 to join the group and an additional $5 each month. They can then take a loan, with 20 percent interest, to pay school fees or meet other expenses.

The backdrop here—chickens, belligerent geese and scrounging dogs running around the yard—seems somewhat incongruous with the women’s swank appearance. Gladys, 46, is wearing gold sandals. Her 19-year-old twins, Maryann and Rebecca, have accented their eyes with bright blue liner; both have amber braids trailing to the small of their backs.

As we tour the property, Maryann suddenly stops. She looks at her black patent-leather pumps now plastered with red mud and then glances up, shielding her face from the sky. “I can’t be in the sun,” she says. “I don’t want to tint.” I laugh and she marvels that though we are about the same cinnamon shade, I am not afraid of getting darker.

Maryann and Rebecca are an interesting study of the pros and cons of westernization. Both are well educated, ambitious, and intend to continue their schooling abroad. But where once she would have been betrothed and promised a dowry, Maryann now says she would rather marry a white man than an African. “They’re more modern,” she explains. “They’ll cook and clean, not like a Kenyan man who won’t do anything.”

Gladys’ second husband, the twins’ stepfather, is white, and she is clearly content with the trappings of her modern life—mobile phone and glitzy clothes. But she also believes that change comes at a cost: “Our traditions are dying,” she says. “If we kill our traditions, there will come a time we won’t know where we belong.”

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In Gakurine, death is as common and as brutal as the torrential April rains. Four out of every five people in the village are infected with HIV/AIDS. Three to four are buried each week.

The Gakurine Family Restoration Self Help Group, composed of 28 local women, was formed in 2000 to assist AIDS victims and their families. Members contribute about $3 a month, but also share vegetables from their shambas and second hand clothes with those affected by the disease. Gladys Gitonga, the group’s treasurer explains: “We are trying to restore families that have been completely broken and put them back in one piece.”

There is a stigma attached to the disease and many victims turn to shamanism rather than western medicine. “When some people get AIDS, they believe they’ve been bewitched,” Winnie, the group’s treasurer, says. “One person has traveled as far as Mombasa [about 300 miles] to be cured by a witchdoctor.” The women therefore visit villagers’ homes hoping to educate people about the disease.

Twenty seven-year-old Gladys Nkirote is also a member of the Gakurine group. The path to her home is red dirt littered with plastic and paper, but the shanty that she uses as her living room is clean and cozy, with two couches, a chair and wardrobe set neatly within the small space. Nkirote hugs me and welcomes me inside. The chair she chooses is beneath a picture of her husband, Moses, who died from AIDS five months ago, just weeks after their son, Vincent, was born. Two weeks ago, Nkirote learnt that she too has AIDS. She has stopped breast-feeding and is given milk by a benevolent neighbor.

Nkirote, Vincent and her daughter Elizabeth live in three sparse rooms along with her sister-in-law, Lidia, and her six children. Lidia’s husband also died of AIDS. The Gakurine group have urged her to get tested, but she cannot afford to at this time.

An AIDS test costs just $2.50, yet most people cannot spare that sum. And medication is $126 a month, far beyond the financial reach of someone like Nkirote who can barely pay her $19 rent now that she is weak and unable to work. And so though she smiles and says in her hushed voice: “I hope you will remember us, and when you come back, that you will find me here,” it is painfully apparent from her gaunt frame and listlessness that Nkirote might not live another year.

The Gakurine group’s ultimate goal is to build an orphanage to protect the children left behind. Often they take to the streets once their parents die. Girls become prey for sugar daddies who in many cases infect them with HIV, beginning the cycle again.

It will cost $843,085 to realize that dream; the women in the group will raise $151,000 and are looking for grants to cover the rest.

The goal seems somewhat lofty considering that the women in the group have little to give themselves. But as Gladys Gitonga says, “If you do not dream, you will never get anything.”

The Woman to Woman Safari is $2870-$3396 per person, depending on the number of travelers; 2003 departure dates are February 24th, June 28th, August 25th, though individual trips can be arranged. Price does not include airfare. For more information, go to eco-resorts.com or call 866-326-7376.