The Dreams of Mothers and Grandmothers

I remember asking a young girl in Tanzania once who in her life had been an inspiration to her. Who was her model or her ‘hero?’ She told me it was her mother. It’s not that she didn’t know about Rock Stars or Movie Stars. Her role model truly was her mother and her response really is not that uncommon.

The celebration of Mother’s Day in North America is only a few weeks away. I can’t help thinking about the mothers and grandmothers I know in Longido and Kimokouwa. They’re very remarkable women. I could show you hundreds of photos and tell you so many stories. They’d be about women of great courage, with stamina and strength and resilience, who will do anything for their children and grandchildren. Their lives will not be celebrated on the second Sunday of May. But you should know they share this earth with you and I and they are very important – to their families, and in their villages and bomas.  Few have positions of prominence or power yet without them advocating on behalf of their daughters for education, the change that is happening in Tanzania today would not be taking place. 

Some of the mothers and grandmothers in Longido and Kimokouwa.

Because I have the good fortune to travel back and forth to Tanzania I see the change. It's seldom reported in the news - all the hopeful things that are happening in Africa. The changes are small and incremental, too, and can be so easily missed. And the women are at the heart of it all. They want their daughters to have lives better than the ones they have, "with education and without FGM", as one grandmother said to me.

There is a very old coco or grandmother in Longido who is raising her grandchildren, as so many women do. She has worn a path to the TEMBO Office, having come so many times to request sponsorship for the girls in her care. Somehow she knows that going to Secondary School, or receiving Vocational Training or Teacher Training holds the possibility of a different and better future. She's right. It does.

I hope you will remember all these women in Tanzania this year as you and your families prepare to acknowledge with appreciation your mothers and grandmothers. TEMBO will meet as many sponsorship requests as it can this year - to provide education opportunities for daughters and granddaughters. The women tell us it is such a great gift. It is the realization of their dreams.

The Power of Mary's Passion

A child-mother in Longido.

I woke up this morning with the image of a very small Maasai girl in mind. She could have been any one of hundreds of young girls in Longido or Kimokouwa. And she could have been in high school because traditionally raised Maasai girls can be very small in stature. While there are many factors that contribute to the size of children, one is the practice of FGM or Female Genital Mutilation.

FGM is a cultural practice performed all over Africa, not just in the TEMBO project area. It is considered to be a right of passage for girls, just as male circumcision is for boys. Education will and is changing the frequency of this harmful ritual being performed on girls before marriage. It is another of the many benefits of formal education in Tanzania: so long as a girl is attending school, early marriage will be delayed and so will activities surrounding child marriages including FGM and early pregnancy.

Penina chose education and no FGM for Naana, her daughter.

I have sat in dark smoky huts with very young girls and women, holding newborn babies that were so tiny and struggling to survive. I know a woman who had twins and was so physically small herself that she could not care for both babies. She made a choice to keep one and gave the other baby away. Babies are born tiny and malnourished because mothers severely restrict the amount of food they eat during pregnancy. This is to limit the extreme pain they will experience delivering their babies as a result of FGM. It is one of the terrible consequences that will linger for a lifetime.

Mary works for change from within the community.

Mary Laiser, TEMBO Education Coordinator and Community Facilitator, has come full circle from being a Maasai woman who believed circumcision was a woman's right to being one of the staunchest advocates against FGM. Mary speaks openly about being circumcised herself. She also made it very publicly known that her own daughter, Happiness, would never experience FGM. Happiness would, and did, have an open ceremony attended by dozens of villagers, including public officials. It was a beautiful ritual filled with meaning, but there was no cutting. Since that day five years ago Mary has facilitated the same ritual for other families so that the right of passage is preserved and so is the health and safety of the girl. Slowly, attitudes are changing.

Women like Mary are important change agents in the community. Mary is trusted by the Maasai community because she is part of it. Her voice and her experience matters. I have said before that the modern world is at the door step of the Maasai. If their culture and traditions are to survive the Maasai must adapt. They do not have the luxury of time and the slow progression through stages that other peoples experienced before the spread of technology. Decisions need to be made now that will determine if there will even be a Maasai culture in the future.

It would be a terrible mistake to conclude that because of harmful practices like FGM the Maasai are "backward" and should be forced to abandon their traditions and assimilated into a western system of values and behaviours. For there is so much more, so much richness that would be an even greater loss if the Maasai culture ceased to exist. I am thinking about things like a deep connection to the land and a respect for the elders in the community - things that our western culture so often loses touch with in its race toward industrial superiority and individuality.

Primary school girls learn from Mary that their voice must be heard.

When the Mountain Stops Giving

I think about water a lot. I find myself doing this because I live in a country where I have virtually unlimited access to water in my daily life to use however I please. It's also because I personally know so many people in Tanzania whose lives center around spending a good part of each day labouring to have enough water to just stay alive. Literally.

In Kimokouwa I am thinking about Merikenoi, Paulina, and Mama Sokoyani; in Longido, Elizabeth, Esupat, Maria, and Nairukoki. Seven women out of thousands, with children and grandchildren they love so much that they really do risk injury daily simply to be able to provide water and thin porridge made with maize flour and water, for their children. It's happening right now, today, as you read this. I know this because last Friday when I spoke by phone with TEMBO Trust Coordinator, Paulina Sumayani, she said that Longido was very hot and very dry and that the TEMBO Guesthouse is purchasing tanker trucks of water in order to stay open. This is remarkable because it is the middle of the season of the "long rains", the time each year when Mt. Longido has a chance to become replenished so it can provide water for the villagers for the coming months. But the rains are failing. Again.

Mt. Longido is the only source of water for people in Longido and Kimokouwa.

Longido and Kimokouwa are situated near the base of Mt. Longido. This is important because Mt. Longido is the only source of water for people who live in this area. Mountain streams flow into a large man made cement reservoir built near the bottom of the mountain, and pipes take the water to common taps scattered throughout the villages. When the rains do not come the water level in the reservoir is very low. Eventually there is no water. Every aspect of life is interrupted and negatively impacted. It's not the same in Ottawa where I live. When water is in danger of getting low we are restricted in watering our lawns.

Here is what is happening in Longido and Kimokouwa right now.

The pipelines bringing water from the mountain to the villages have all but dried up. In Longido, all but one of the taps will be shut off. People who ordinarily would bring their colourful buckets and line up to get water at different taps throughout the village, on their one weekly water day, must now all line up at one tap in the village center. The UN suggests that each person needs 20-50 litres of safe fresh water a day to ensure their basic needs for drinking, cooking, and sanitation (World Water Assessment Programme). Today, most people will wait for hours at the tap and then will go home with empty buckets. Water is prioritized for use in the schools so they can remain open, since schools are the one place where children will receive food each day. In Kimokouwa this is one cup of corn kernels boiled in water to soften them. It may well be the only food many children receive today.

Women fetching water from a deep well in Kimokouwa.

During times of drought, the women walk long distances each day in search of water in deep open pits that have been dug near Mt. Longido. As the water level goes down the danger of slipping and being injured increases. Water is being delivered by tanker trucks from Namanga, 30 kilometers away or Arusha 100 kilometers away, and sold by the bucket to anyone with money to buy it. Young men push crudely made heavy wooden carts filled with large yellow plastic drums to the cattle trough a few kilometers outside of Longido to fetch water to sell to villagers. Many people will buy a bucket or two of this because it is all they can afford. So, contracting typhoid and diarrhoea are also problems. Many people will get sick.

TEMBO staff member Mary Laiser, and women in the KWGP, share
 their challenges with July 2011 Traveling with TEMBO visitors.
Mt. Longido is in the background.

Why am I writing about this? It's important that you know the world the families of the girls TEMBO sponsors for education live in. I am thinking of Tepayani, and Nana, and Joyce's families. And the mothers and grandmothers in the Micro-Business program or the Kimokouwa Women's Goat Project - this is their world, too. And the TEMBO staff who live and work in Longido and Kimokouwa. If these days are any indication, 2012 is going to be another year - maybe the seventh or eighth in a row - of a drought that only gets worse and deepens.

And tomorrow and the day after, and the day after that, will be just the same as today. It is my deepest desire that a secure source of clean water will be available for all the people in Longido and Kimokouwa by the end of the UN International Decade for Action on Water in 2015. It's a basic need and a right that I look forward to working with the people to realize and enjoy, however I can.

Longido children sitting on plastic water containers.
Their future must include having their right to clean, safe water realized.

The Slow and Steady Progress of One Small Project

Oyaya has years of experience and training to share with the KWGP women.

Here in Canada I can only stir up images of Tanzania, half a world away. But this is not difficult for me to do. I need only close my eyes and so many people flood through my mind. Today it is the women in the KWGP (Kimokouwa Women’s Goat Project.)  I am sure I am thinking goats because it is spring, or spring-like, in this part of the world where I live. It’s the time for renewal and rebirth and for new life bursting forth from the dark and cold of winter, and in very unexpected places.

I am transported back to Kimokouwa by looking at a photo I took of Oyaya, one of the coordinators of the KWGP, in early August 2011, during a seminar for the women in the goat project.  He is sitting in the soft late-afternoon light holding a baby goat on his lap as he smiles reflectively. Oyaya was unaware I was taking this photo from inside a nearby hut so he did not have time to be shy, as he might have been. Inside a small room in the Montessori School in Kimokouwa, women have been meeting all week to share ideas about goat care and where they might find food during the ongoing and worsening drought they have been experiencing for over six years. One of the women nursing a two month old child tells the others she planted some maize (corn) outside her boma and this helped her a great deal. First the maize and then the stalks provided sustenance. Others talked about places they had found food in the parched countryside and around the foot of Mt Longido. This kind of sharing provides hope for the women.

One of the young boys who takes care of the goats during the day.

The KWGP is one of the newer TEMBO initiatives and it forms an integral part of the Micro-Business arm of TEMBO (Tanzania Education and Micro-Business Opportunity.) The project was tailor made to suit the needs of the women in Kimokouwa where micro-business loans proved to be unsuccessful due to a lack of commerce in this very traditional Maasai village. The goat project enjoys widespread support from the women, their husbands, the village leaders, TEMBO Trust in Tanzania, and Project TEMBO donors in Canada.

The KWGP began in September 2010 with the first 15 women each receiving two pregnant female goats to raise. The ‘Isiolo’goats are a particularly hardy breed known for being drought tolerant, a very important consideration since Kimokouwa spends a good part of the year in severe drought. Each woman gives her first born female goat to another woman so the project will eventually be sustained from within. Male goats will be sold once they are a year old with the women keeping 90% of the money and the other 10% put in a bank account to help with expenses.

Oyaya is one of two TEMBO staff dividing his time between providing security at the TEMBO Guesthouse as an askari or watchman, and using husbandry skills to help the goat project succeed. Oyaya has some veterinary training which comes in very handy. Sanjoy, also a TEMBO security staff and a traditional Maasai herder, shares the task of visiting the groups weekly to provide assistance to the women, and to track the growth of the project.

Medicine is carried in a plastic pouch and dosages are recorded.

Sanjoy goes up the hill to give a dose of medicine to a goat.

Talk about new life springing from dark places! Not much can survive in Kimokouwa but these goats are proving to be the exception.  The KWGP is now entering the second tier or program level. The first 30 goats have now grown into close to 60 making it possible for new women to join the project. Females are being passed on to new members and the males are ready to be sold at the weekly market with most of the income going to the women.

I have travelled with Oyaya and Sanjoy by motor bike around the foot of Mt. Longido to Kimokouwa early in the morning, as day is breaking, to visit some of the women. We need to get there before the goats are led out to graze for the day by the young boys. It is a chance for me to get first hand accounts from the women about how the goats are making a difference in their lives. On the visits Oyaya and Sanjoy often dispense medicine to sick goats. They are in close contact by cell phone with the women between visits so they are kept up to date on not only sicknesses and other challenges, but also good news stories and pregnancies. I was with Sanjoy one day when he received a call from a very distraught woman saying a cheetah had taken one of her goats. In fact, it was a goat that had regularly provided so much milk for her family. Times like this serve as a constant reminder that the women share life and space with wild animals always on the lookout for food, especially during times of drought. In cases like this, or when a goat dies due to unavoidable sickness, TEMBO will replace a goat during the first year.

More than 40 women, many with babies, attended a 4 day workshop
 on goat care in August 2011.

The women talk of having milk for their children and this is one of the immediate benefits, and a plus. Having a couple of litres of milk to mix with maize flour to make porridge in the morning can feed many. This may be the only food some have until nightfall. We did not calculate this into the possible gains a woman would receive when we began the project. We focused on the income she would receive once or twice a year when the goats were sold for food. The women are also proud to be able to “own” something in a culture where it is the men who typically have this right. The men promised they would allow the women to use the proceeds from the sale of the goats to feed their families and they are doing this.

The KWGP is enjoying success and this is due, in large part, to the hard work and dedication of Oyaya and Sanjoy. The women aren’t the only ones who take pride in this project. You can see it in the eyes of these two men and hear it in story after story they tell about their interactions with the women and their goats. You can see it, too, when Oyaya proudly shows us a certificate he received when he attended a course to further his knowledge of veterinary medicine - his initiative and his expense - at an agricultural college during his annual leave. All of the women of TEMBO, including me, are deeply greatful to Oyaya and Sonjoy for their commitment to making the KWGP a project that is improving life for so many women and their families in northern Tanzania.

Worlds Apart and Worlds Together

Paulina and Kokoyai in Kimokouwa.

The other day I came across this photo of Paulina, TEMBO Trust Project Coordinator, and Kokoyai, a young mother living in Kimokouwa I have known since she was 10 years old. The photo is a couple of years old - Paulina, who usually wears Western-style clothing, now has her head shaved, like Kokoyai. At a glance it's a photo of two young traditional Maasai women. If you've visited the TEMBO project area you know these women live very different lives - actually "worlds apart." Still, both play a very important part in the telling of the story of TEMBO and the work we do. I find myself thinking how these two women live "worlds together," too, each telling an important part of a larger story. It's a story about evolution, modernity, and the oh so fragile balancing act of moving forward in a world changing at lightening speed while still being true to a cultural heritage filled with richness and beauty. How will they keep it all together?

In Kimokouwa, Kokoyai is part of the Maasai people who choose to live a very traditional lifestyle. Though they cannot follow the rains to graze large herds of cattle like they once did, due to government laws restricting their movement, the people still live in mud huts, eat a simple diet, dress in colourful shukas, and observe tribal norms and customs. Kokoyai attended Kimokouwa Primary School, as mandated by the government, and she and her father opted for Kokoyai to marry when she finished Standard Seven rather than continue her education. She and her husband, Philipo, currently have two boys. According to custom, Philipo is free to have as many wives as he wants. Kokoyai  also belongs to the KWGP (Kimokouwa Women's Goat Project), coordinated by TEMBO Trust.

The power stick carried by men, now with the pen representing education.

Paulina grew up in a Maasai boma near Mt. Kilimanjaro where observing traditional customs and practices was very important for her father, too. He wanted Paulina to marry after primary school. Paulina wanted desperately to continue her education. With the help of her mother, her brother, and others Paulina succeeded in completing secondary school and earned a full scholarship to the University of Dar es Salaam. Paulina's father attended her graduation ceremony and gave her a pen and a notebook as a gift, symbolizing his wish for her to continue to study, if it was her wish. He had come a long way and was embracing change.

Over the years, I have observed striking images expressing the reality that the Maasai are struggling to hold two realities, two worlds together. The world of the 21st century is knocking at the door of the Maasai in Tanzania. It is a tenuous time filled with tremendous possibilities and wrought with danger too. There is a lot at stake. As in any culture, some practices of old need to be discontinued and left behind in order for people to move forward. Women like Paulina, because of the education they have received, have a pivotal role to play in reshaping the new world of the Maasai. Knowing how to change, what to let go of and what to keep, is best done  from within by those who understand and cherish the world of the Maasai. These strong voices must be heard over the noise and values of other societies that threaten to consume and assimilate them as they have done to other tribes and other peoples throughout time.

Receiving a cell phone message: Kokoyai's father, Paulo, is in his 80's and embracing change. 

Kokoyai and the Maasai of Kimokouwa and Longido, and throughout Tanzania, have a right to a traditional life if they so choose. Paulina, and many other educated women and men like her, are using their skills to help keep everything in balance: saying thoughtfully to the Maasai 'yes' keep this, it is good, and 'no' this practice is harmful and outdated and it must go; and to those outside who would exploit or deceive the Maasai they say 'these are our rights by law, our education has taught us so.' Those of us fortunate enough to have been allowed to play a part in this unfolding must only play a supporting role, actively enabling women like Paulina and Kokoyai to take center stage.

Celebrating the Girls and Women of TEMBO

The girls and women I know in Longido and Kimokouwa are some of the strongest and most resilient people I have ever met. This year, on International Women's Day, March 8, I celebrate and give thanks for their lives.

Our lives are worlds apart in many ways. Most Tanzanian women live without the conveniences and blessings I often take for granted: running water, electricity, affordable quality education, good medical care, abundant food, and so much more. It is good that I can leave the comfort of my own life and culture to live in their world when I can. It helps me to put so much in perspective. I always return home feeling so much more grateful for what I have been given simply because I have been born in Canada.

Members of the KWGP group, their husbands, and village leaders.

Since my first visit to Tanzania in July 1998, I have watched little girls grow into beautiful young women and mothers. Some have chosen to remain in their bomas as traditional Maasai; some have had no say in making decisions about their lives; others have had courageous mothers who have pleaded on their behalf that their daughters might go to school; and there is a growing number of girls who have both parents wisely including education opportunities knowing that the world is changing for the Maasai as it is for people everywhere.

And isn't the world in transition? Few on this earth are not caught up in the fast moving current of change knocking at everyone's door. The women I am thinking of today want life for their daughters to be different than it is for them and they are willing to pay a high price to make this happen. They walk miles in search of firewood and water, spend long hours selling foodstuffs under the hot African sun to earn small amounts of money, and have had their lives given value by the number of cattle their husbands have "paid" for them.

Penina with her mother, daughter, and extended family.

I laud all the girls and women in Longido and Kimokouwa who have the audacity to dream for something better then they have today. I honour the women able to make small positive changes in their homes and families as a result of their participation in the micro-business program. And I honour the girls requesting education sponsorship and working hard to daily overcome great obstacles simply to stay in school.

Future generations will reap the rewards of your hopes and dreams, hard work and quiet sacrifices. And leaders will come from among you, even in your lifetime. I know this because I know you. You are a part of a great momentum composed of so many mothers and daughters all over the world. You are not alone. Happy International Women's Day!

Some of the TEMBO sponsored girls at the TEMBO English Camp, 2011.