Arrival

 
It’s half past nine in the morning and warmth radiates from the valley floor. We climb from our vehicle onto bright, hot dust, stretching limbs gone stiff from eighty minutes of a jostled negotiation with brush and backroads.

We’ve looked forward to this visit for weeks: two former KKC students, Olivia and Rachel (their names changed to preserve privacy), are both home on their break between school terms, and it’s been a while since Lucy has seen them. Lucy is our program manager and the girls’ treasured mentor and friend. (Mark and I don’t factor anywhere into this relational equation, but our fortuitous connection with Lucy allows us and another teacher to tag along.)

 

 

Within minutes, both girls materialize to greet us. We follow Olivia along a path that leads to her family’s homestead. Built on this expanse of bleached earth are three houses, a chicken coop, and a small, fenced-in kraal. A crowd of curious relatives and neighbors gather, and Olivia makes introductions — several brothers, a sister, a cousin, a neighbor — before we duck into the manyatta where she and her younger siblings live.

 

 

The house is dark and cool, a pair of rooms with mudded walls stretching from the ground to the layered roof. The lack of windows shields the kids from the daytime sun and, I presume, predatory wildlife at night. We step from a narrow hallway into a room centered around a jiko on the ground. Threads of smoke curl from this squat metal stove cupping ash and bloodred embers.

 

 

Ingenuity at work

 
As Lucy, Mark, and I do not come from Maasai homes, the visit quickly turns educational. Olivia answers our questions, perching on a low stool the kids use when they tend the cooking fire. We learn that house construction is the sole responsibility of young women once they marry. They begin by building a frame of sturdy branches interlaced with smaller sticks, then plastered with a mixture of mud and cow manure. As the walls weather and crumble over time, the women must routinely patch or rebuild their houses.

I study the smooth expanse of the interior wall behind Olivia as she speaks. One of her siblings has turned it into a chalkboard, scratching out numbers, sums, the word “maths” and, inexplicably, “camel.”

We know that Olivia is an outstanding student. As Lucy tells it, she always has been. And in homes bereft of paper, books, pencils, and computers, the kids find their own methods of study and practice. Often their grit and resourcefulness, or that of an older sibling like Olivia, determine the difference between sinking and excelling, between academic obscurity and the kind of achievement that makes teachers look your way and pay attention.

 

 

Close quarters

 
We step through a doorway to the second room: a narrow stretch of open floor flanked by two beds. In the green tint of a solar lamp, Olivia lifts the mattress from a bed. She shows us how the pallet beneath is woven from sticks topped with a stiff sheet of plastic and propped on wooden posts.

The beds are a little wider than an army cot and sleep three to four children apiece. I think about my brothers as I consider this arrangement. As kids, we loved each other like mad (still do), but we also couldn’t breathe amicably in one another’s space for more than ten minutes.

 

 

Back outside, Olivia motions to a manyatta in the background: her brother’s. Boys often move out of the family home when they become morans – members of the warrior age-set. The kraal sits nearby, a fenced area housing vulnerable livestock at night. Many Maasai families build their kraals from acacia branches, the thorned brambles functioning as a natural barrier, but this one is a construction of thin wired fencing.

A couple dozen paces in the opposite direction sits their mom’s house, L-shaped and modern, its sheet metal walls painted azure and pink.

 

 

The roots of friendship

 
“How did you first meet Lucy?” Mark asks Olivia as we stand in the shade outside her mother’s house.

Olivia smiles as she recounts the story: She was in Class 3 at the nearby primary school where KKC serves lunch. She loved talking to Lucy, this elegant, accomplished lady who radiated kindness. She’d follow Lucy around, chatting about what she was learning in school and asking a river of questions. They soon became friends.

Lucy adds that Olivia was the first student she came to know well. Watching Olivia talk, I can picture her as a wiry wisp of a girl, her tiny spine held tall with curiosity and courage.

 

 

Future plans

 
Olivia is now in Form 4 – her final year of high school. She wants to become an educator in math, physics, or English. Her grades place her at the top of her class.

Her story is remarkable not just because few girls from this region continue education past the primary grades, but because she has managed to keep aflame the bright belief that her goals are reasonable. Olivia knows that she is capable, promising, full of worth. She understands that she can marry and tend to a homestead and family if that’s what she chooses, and just as readily she can attend university and teach eager, ebullient students like herself.

 

 

It’s funny how something as small as daily lunch and computer lessons can nourish not just minds and bodies but also hope. Ambition. Courage.

Olivia’s path will require a steely grit as she veers from generations of prescribed family roles. She knows, however, that she doesn’t venture alone. Hundreds of people around the globe have joyfully invested in her health and education, and you are in her corner still.

The future is rife with promise.

 

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Please join us for part 2 of our visit: Rachel’s story.