Over four years ago, I met Agnes Pareyio at a SOLID organized conference on AIDS in Africa. Agnes spoke about her work to end female genital mutilation (FGM) amongst her Maasai people in Kenya. Agnes’ own experiences of FGM and early marriage led her to a lifelong commitment to end these practices, to promote girls education and to generally improve the lives of girls and women.
Building on her initial interventions of walking from village to village and speaking with people, she developed educational programs and opened a rescue centre for girls fleeing FGM.
“We can give up female genital mutilation and still be Maasai,” I remember her saying then. She was actively creating new forms of ritual to support girls transitioning to adulthood without cutting.
I visited Agnes and the girls of Tasaru Rescue Centre shortly after that conference four years ago and have carried with me since then Agnes’ relentless commitment and the feisty spirits of the girls who often walked long distances to seek shelter and a different kind of life.
So when we planned to leave our work in Rwanda for a two-week holiday in Kenya, a visit to Narok was essential. I met again with Agnes and we spoke about how her work had evolved.
We sat in the office of the Tasaru Girls Rescue Centre. Agnes told a story about an old man with six wives who had become impoverished because of drought. As his animals died of the only potential income had left was what he could obtain for marrying off his daughters.
“Poverty is the driving force here,” said Agnes.
The old man believed that marry a daughter he had to cut her, but his daughter ran away. But thanks to the work that Agnes has spearheaded, he eventually came around to see that there was another way and reconciled with his daughter. Recently, the father and daughter spoke together at a conference in Washington, DC.
But reconciliation is not without its problems. Agnes initially thought the reconciled girls would return home, but the girls found village life difficult. There is often no electricity to study, the work is harsh, the food is minimal. The girls have been changed by their experience, and they want to come back and live at Tasaru, creating pressure on the facility.
The girls stay at Tasaru in between school sessions, when they board at school, and this past Christmas season the dormitories were overcrowded with 76 girls.
And as members of some communities increasingly turn from FGM and early marriage, (30% in one community) others watch to see what will happen to these girls. Will they be able to go to school, to find employment?
Agnes is now developing a school for girls, which is currently under construction and will hopefully open this coming summer. “10 girls in every class will be girls who have fled FGM,” she said. The school will also serve to bring in funds.
The school is one aspect of the bigger plans in Agnes Pareyio’s mind. “There should be a dormitory in every school for girls who need to be safe,” she said, “and a law to prosecute anyone who impregnates a girl before the age of 18.”
She would like to have a bigger impact on effecting change for women and Kenya’s new constitution offers a doorway. Government will devolve into 47 regions, and each will elect a women’s representative. Agnes is going to run.
“This new position (of women’s representative) is an opportunity for women and a challenge for me. The men will say, ‘she has our girls, she takes us to court,’ and ‘are you going to vote for someone who denied you a wife?’”
“But the women will say, ‘why not her?”
Agnes knows that the fight against early marriage and FGM is inseparable from the overall issues of women’s lives. She wants women to not have to carry 20 liters of water on their backs from the river; she wants women to have clean water, she wants women to have an education.
She wants, more than anything, for women to find their voice. She describes how Maasai women step back if men are present, how boys are given food first in the hope that they will be able to lead the family, how women consider themselves as children because their husbands view them as children.
“I want,” she said, “for women to think that they are somebody.”
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