A Girl Child is in Danger

Annamaria on Monday

While researching the first two books of my Africa series, I never learned about female genital mutilation (FGM).  Those first stories dealt with colonialism’s general effects on the tribal populations. The plot of Book 3–The Blasphemers, however, deals specifically with the treatment of pastoralist peoples.  In studying them, I learned that in 1906 British missionaries had begun to fight against FGM.  They sought, over a hundred years ago, to make the practice illegal in British East Africa (now Kenya).  Such laws eventually passed. But – as with all crimes – having a law does not stop people from committing criminal acts. FGM continues to be practiced until this day.  For the girls between ages eleven and fourteen, it is almost immediately followed by forced marriage.

 

These cultural customs became background to the story of The Blasphemers.  Then, just as the book launched, I met Sarah Lesiamito, a proud Maasai woman from Samburu, Kenya, who at the time, had begun to rescue girls from these still-entrenched, retrogressive customs that robbed female children of freedom of any choice of how to live their lives.  I began doing what I could to support Sarah’s work.

When pastoralist girls refuse circumcision and want to continue with their education, they are almost always banished from their families.  Therefore, they need all the necessities of life–food, clothing, shelter, and moral support.

 

Sarah began by taking the girls into her own home, and for many years gave them all they needed to finish school and sometimes to go on to secondary school and higher education. One of those girls is now a nurse, who volunteers her services to the girls who have come after her.  When I met Sarah, she had ten girls in her care.

 

As her success grew, Sarah founded the Sidai Resource Center and attained non-profit community organization status in Kenya.  Sidai now has a dormitory building and cares for  forty-seven girls who have refused FGM and forced marriage and are now finishing school.  They are becoming full-fledged members of society.  Thanks to Sarah and Sidai.

 

 

 

Over the past couple of years, a group of friends have joined me in supporting this important work.  Our first goal was to gain tax-exempt status in the United States, so that we might invite others, who believe in education and freedom for girls everywhere, to join us.  We have persevered in this complicated process and are thrilled to announce, that under the auspices of CAFAmerica, we can now do so.

 

Today, I am inviting you!

 

Many of you, I am sure, believe in causes like ours.  Now, your donation can save a girl from pain and suffering that could last her lifetime.  Or from an infection that will rob her of her life.  Your generosity can free a twelve-year-old from being forced to marry a man many times her own age.  

 

A girl you support may become a teacher.  An accountant.  A seamstress.  A doctor.

 

A world of opportunity awaits those girls.

 

You can participate in their liberation.

 

Right here!  Right now!

DONATE   

SIDAI WEBSITE

 

 

 

 

Of Sarah and the Moon

Annamaria on Monday

I have two things I want to tell.  That they have nothing to do with one another troubles me a bit.  But not enough to stop me from writing about both.

Sarah

In Samburu in Northern Kenya this week, sixty Maasai girls are finishing their semester at school without absenteeism.  Regular readers fo MIE may recall that they had been missing twenty-five percent of their instruction because they lacked a way to deal with their monthly periods.  Here is what their teacher Sarah Lesiamito, an activist for girl's rights, reported this past Thursday:

Here are some pictures of me distributing the sanitary towels that you donated to school girls.

For sure none of the girls could hide their happiness for this very important day and important gift.

On behalf of the girls and me am so grateful for this kind donation and for sure it will keep the girls in school longer and could do their class work without interruption and absenteeism at school.

60 girls in the background!

 I have been doing the happy dance every time I look at the faces of the girls in these photos.  The girls will be taking their exams in the next two weeks, with added confidence.    What a privilege and a JOY for me to play a part supporting Sarah in her essential work.

The Moon

"No other act of exploration ever laid a plaque saying, 'We Came in Peace for All Mankind.'"
-Neil deGrasse Tyson

This week, the world has been commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.  I watched that telecast in real time all those years ago in the company of my then husband and some friends.  I wish I had a picture of the cake I made and decorated with a little landing module and an astronaut fashioned out of a plastic figure and tin foil.

Celebrating with champagne!

I have always been transfixed by the moon.   Never more than on that evening.

On August 13th of 1969, my office on the fifth floor of 100 Broadway overlooked the ticker tape parade for the Apollo team: the biggest one in history, they said.  Here are my souvenir photos of that event.

My hand dropping punch-card confetti on the astronauts (bottom right).
YES! in 1969 we were still using computers that needed punchcards.
And the NASA engineers landed men safely on the moon and brought them safely home.

I'll end with my favorite ever own photograph of the moon, taken in the company of Michael Sears--who took me to the perfect spot in Limpopo in South Africa to watch the super moonrise.

Talking about the Unspeakable

Annamaria on Monday

We are all thrilled and have been bragging about and congratulating our blogmate Sujata Massey for winning the Mary Higgins Clark Award.  It's a great achievement for any novelist.      But it is even greater in this case.  Sujata did it AND she did so with a novel that discusses a topic no one talks about: menstruation.

Yes, my friends, I am saying that word - the one no one says in public - right here on MIE, in front of all of you.  Sujata's book brings up the topic in connection with the inhumane way menstruating girls and women were treated in early Twentieth Century India.  By caging them.  Not in the Middle Ages.  Less than a hundred years ago.

In many places - to this day - menstruating girls are isolated, considered filthy.  Orthodox members of major religions consider them literally untouchable.

Yet this taboo - as a subject AND as a process - is an essential part of human reproduction. If your mother had never menstruated, YOU WOULD NOT BE HERE!

Yes, now I am shouting and talking about your mother.

Women through the ages have greeted the arrival their monthly bleeding with glee if they did not want a baby, or tears if they were longing for a child.  This part of the cycle of human reproduction often comes with quite a lot of pain.  Certainly with inconvenience and discomfort.

Now for some good news.  This nice story about menstruation began when I met my friend Sarah Lesiamito, a Samburu-Maasai teacher, working in a remote part of Northern Kenya.  She has mounted a singled-handed effort to save the girls in her tribe, especially her students, from circumcision and forced early marriage.  To do this, she needs to keep the girls in school.

Moved by her devotion to her goal, I wanted to do what I could to help her.  I asked her what she needed for her girls.  I thought she would say books, or school supplies.  I had thoughts of shipping her pens and notebooks.  Her immediate answer was, "Sanitary napkins."

While I was recuperating from my surprise at her answer, she explained that the girls in her school have no way of dealing with their monthly flow.  During those days, they find it impossible to go to school.  So they stay home.  This means that they miss a week of school out of every four.  Eventually, without 25% of the instruction that the male students are getting, many of them fall behind, become discouraged, and drop out.  At which point, they have no other life choice but to submit to circumcision and being sold, in exchange for goats and cows, into marriage to a man who is likely at least three times their age.

I promised Sarah I would find a way to supply what the girls need to have life of their own.

Again, being the cockeyed optimist that I am, I found the solution to be more difficult than I imagined.  My first approach - begging the supplies from an American manufacturer and sending them to Sarah - turned out to be undoable.  There would be import taxes and customs complications.

We needed a local supply, and best of all, a reusable solution.

The path to the answer went this way:

Tony Sargent, friend in NYC, a real estate agent, had introduced me to a FaceBook friend whom he had never met who lived in Nairobi: Lydia Halliday.   There, Lydia had introduced me to her friend Jessica Ramey, who works as a consultant in the fashion industry.  Months later, when Jessica heard about the plight of the Samburu school girls, she said one of her clients might know of an answer.  She introduced me to a woman in New York, who works for one of her client companies.  That woman put me in touch with Charlotte Horler who works for SOKO, a cooperative of women seamstresses, who sew clothing in Nairobi.  They make reusable sanitary napkins from the scraps left after producing all-cotton women's clothing.

Voila'!  And Whew.  The trail took a year and three months.  We achieved our goal as of this week.  These little items are ready, just in time for the beginning of the school year.

Sarah's husband is arranging for 480 of them - enough to supply 60 girls - to be transported seven hours from Nairobi to Samburu.

Study hard, girls!

And thank you to all the kind hearts and informed minds that got us to success.

The journey took a village, but we arrived.