Our sisterhood is global
Photo by The Moon Magazine
originally published on The Moon Magazine
I first learned of Jane Wanjiru Muigai Kamphuis watching the HBO documentary, A Small Act. The film told the story of Chris Mburu—Jane’s cousin—whose primary education in a rural village in Kenya was sponsored by a woman he’d never met in Sweden. Both Jane and Mburu grew up to become Harvard-educated human rights lawyers, and one day, Mburu got the idea for the two of them to start their own education fund to “pay forward” the gift a woman named Hilde Back had given them. The film tells the story of Mburu’s efforts to locate Hilde Back and bring her to Kenya to see the results of her small act. It also portrays the daunting circumstances poor Kenyan children overcome to acquire a high school education. Throughout the film, Jane’s is a voice for the importance of educating girls—and recognizing the double jeopardy they face in passing the qualifying exam because of all the household work they are expected to perform in addition to their studies.
When planning this issue of The MOON on GRRL Rising, I thought of Jane and contacted The Hilde Back Education Fund to try to locate her. Within thirty minutes, I’d received an email from her in Nairobi, Kenya, where she is currently stationed as the senior regional liaison officer with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). She has spent twenty years in the practice and application of international human rights, humanitarian, and refugee law with the United Nations and civil society in various countries. We spoke at length via telephone. – By Leslee Goodman
The MOON: Please tell us about your life growing up as a girl in a small village in Kenya.
Muigai: I had a rural upbringing in central Kenya. As a child, my best memories are of the nursery school—the equivalent of kindergarten in the U.S.—which I used to walk to with my friends. It was about five kilometers—or a little more than three miles—but we played along the way. The nursery school was sponsored by a group of Swedish people, so we had some wonderful luxuries like free toys, crayons and we ate oatmeal in the morning and a nice lunch in the afternoon. I have wonderful recollections of that time.
As early as primary school, however, life for us girls began to change. After school we had to do more chores than the boys. We walked to the river, we fetched water, we cooked, we washed the clothes, we fed the animals. The boys had chores too, but the girls had more. While the boys could play, the girls were expected to start becoming responsible for the life of the family.
Our schoolteachers also emphasized personal hygiene for us girls, but not the boys. We had to submit to “hygiene checks,” in which we partially undressed and submitted our uniforms and underwear for examination. It was female teachers who did the examining; yet still, it was clear that girls were held to a different standard than the boys. We were frequently told that we had to be clean and neat, which was evidently not a concern for boys. We didn’t even realize how strange it was until we grew up and thought, “What were they thinking, asking us to undress to inspect our underwear?”
Another example: The village would show movies at an open-air location at night. Only boys could go; girls were not allowed. The next day there would be a discussion of the film in school, but of course the girls couldn’t participate because they hadn’t seen the film.
The MOON: Why couldn’t the girls go?
Muigai: It was considered unsafe. But of course, as adults, we questioned that. Surely it could have been possible to make it safe: our older siblings or parents could accompany us. The villagers themselves could have protected us. The films could have been shown in a location that didn’t require walking a long distance. But that wasn’t the culture. It would have been considered an outrage; totally unacceptable behavior for girls to go. And because we didn’t have electricity or television in our homes, this was a big treat that the boys got and the girls didn’t.
I felt this same sense of flagrant injustice in 2009 when my cousin Chris—who founded the Hilde Back Education Fund with me and others, and who is also a human rights worker—was also living in Geneva with his non-Kenyan wife, while I was living in Geneva with my non-Kenyan husband. We both had young children and I realized that Chris’s child could travel to Kenya with him as a citizen, but my child could not. I had to pay for a visa for him to return “home.” His child was automatically a Kenyan; my child was not. That was Kenyan law at the time: one law for men married to non-Kenyans and having a child outside of the country; another law for women in the same situation. I thought, “Wow. Here we are at the village cinema again.”
The MOON: Tell us more about your education—you ended up graduating from Harvard. Tell us how that happened.
————————————————————————-
Part 2:
Originally published on The Moon Magazine
Muigai: Education was greatly valued by all, but poor families like mine had challenges. Kids could miss school for days to earn a living picking coffee in the plantations. Of course this affected their performance. In 1983 we sat for our the primary school exam—the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education exam, the same one the children in A Small Act had to pass—and I was very fortunate to be accepted into a girls-only boarding school. The best boy in our class did not make it to secondary school, and he went into full-time child labor, picking coffee. It pains me to this day that he and my other friends who would today be lawyers, engineers, doctors, just languished in poverty.
I was fortunate to transition to secondary school. I do not know how many Kenyan children did not at the time, but today, about 200,000 Kenyan children each year are prevented by poverty from attending secondary school.
For me, after struggles with missing weeks of school on account of school fees, I was fortunate to get a sponsor. A Swedish women’s rights activist, Evy Warholm, attending the 1985 Women’s Conference in Kenya, visited our school as one of the tours organized for Conference delegates. We met and have remained close to this day. She sponsored my education right through high school (1985-1989). But it was not just the money that helped me; it was the care, the attention, and encouragement that she offered me. She sent me my first ever birthday gift in January 1986! She inspired in me a desire to advocate for women’s rights. She aided the realization of my dream to become a lawyer. When I sponsor young girls and boys in their education today, when I hear them speak of their dreams, I think of that unique experience I share with Evy. I tell them I am a living example of how far they can get. I hope to keep their spirits strong for years to come, as Evy has done. She still sponsors kids today, a generation later, despite being a widow living on state pension. The last time I saw her in Sweden, we were standing in her kitchen. She opened a small tea pot and pulled out savings in Swedish kronas. She told me to deliver it to a boy in Kenya she sponsors through the Hilde Back Fund, so that he can realize his dream of studying and becoming a pilot! It was so emotional for me. I thought to myself, this is how she saved to send me to school.
So back to my own education, I went on to complete six years of secondary school at a girls boarding school, did well on my exams, and in 1990 I entered the University of Nairobi where I began to study law. In my first year as a law student I approached the Federation of Women Lawyers in Nairobi, which was a young organization, and told them I wanted to work for women’s rights. They were very pleased and impressed that I would join them; that I had the courage at such a young age to work for women’s rights. Because you have to understand: to stand up for women at that time took courage. In many parts of the world today it still does.
So my first project with the Federation of Women Lawyers was to study the conditions of women prisoners in Nairobi. This was very, very scary. From what I saw there I vowed that if I had to be sentenced to prison in Kenya I would rather die. The conditions were so horrible. It was very shocking to see that women had been violated in prison by the wardens and had born their children in prison. They were treated brutally, even though the majority of them should not even have been there at all. If they’d known their rights, if they’d had legal representation, they would never have been convicted.
The MOON: Yes. Could you tell us a bit about the things a woman could be arrested and imprisoned for in Kenya at the time? I understand that in 2010 Kenya got a new Constitution that has greatly improved the status of women, but in 1985, when I attend the United Nations’ World Conference on Women in Nairobi, women told us it was against the law for them to own property, to have a checking account, to utilize birth control.
Muigai: Yes. Even now there are many women who will not tell even their husbands that they have accepted family planning services. Many of the women I saw in prison were there because of the behavior of their husbands or sons. The police would question them and, if the women said they didn’t know anything about the activity their husbands were allegedly involved in—which was probably true—they would be arrested and charged with concealing evidence or obstructing police officers in the course of their duties—charges that would not have held water if the women had been able to afford legal representation. There were also women on death row who had landed there because of the untimely or unexpected deaths of their husbands. At that time, the first assumption of the police was that the wife had done it, whether she knew anything about it or not. Then, without legal representation, the women didn’t know about their right to remain silent; that if they made contradictory statements, they would be held against them; nor that the police—whom they often assumed were trying to help them—were in fact building a case against them. So the women would go to court and find out that they had unwittingly put themselves on the wrong side of the law.
Then of course many women could have gotten out on appeal, but they had no resources to appeal. So they would sit out their sentence in these horrible conditions. The way the prison wardens spoke to these women shocked me, as did the hardship of the work they were subjected to. They were also forced to submit to invasive searches—supposedly for contraband—whether or not there had been any conceivable means of them receiving contraband.
Yet despite the indignities they were subjected to, all they were worried about was the fate of their children. They didn’t even see that they were being mistreated; they just kept crying for their children: I hope my children are getting enough to eat. I hope my children are not getting kicked off their family lands. I hope my children are not undergoing this or that. It made me realize how different women are from men in their basic instincts. Here they were in prison suffering horribly, but their concern was with their children, who were free.
That was the first project I did with Women Lawyers. With that for starters, I joined the human rights movement. I participated in various other human rights research projects, as well as in student leadership activities throughout my undergraduate years. In 1992, I was part of the Students Lobby, termed SONU ’92 (for Students Organization of Nairobi University), advocating for more democracy in the country. This was a very big deal because, as a result, the government wanted to expel us from school. Fortunately, human rights defenders who had studied law before us—led by Kenya’s current Chief Justice, Willy Mutunga—came to our defense. They went to court and got an injunction against the university, so we were able to complete our University studies.
I graduated from the University of Nairobi as one of the top graduates in 1993 and in 1995, I got a scholarship to study for a master’s in law (LL.M) at Harvard Law School. I believe that the acceptance and scholarship were the result of my work in human rights and the public interest, as well as my academic achievement.
The MOON: As I mentioned previously, when I was in Kenya in 1985, women couldn’t own property, have a bank account, and so on. Everything had to be in their husband’s name. But in 2010 Kenya instituted a new Constitution that has made some dramatic changes. Can you talk about that?
—————————————————————–
Part 3:
Originally published on The Moon Magazine
Muigai: Yes. We are very happy these days because a lot has changed. My mother’s life is definitely not my life. We have an impressively expanding middle class of Kenyan professionals, including women. Many things have changed for the better. Women can obtain their own identification card; they can own property; they can pass citizenship to their children; they can own matrimonial property. The contribution of housewives to family stability is recognized, even for women who did not earn money. The law recognizes that their contribution to family stability is part of what enabled their husband to earn money. So many things have changed, but we still do not have anything near equal participation in the economic field and worse still, in the political process. Not a single woman was elected to Kenya’s Senate in the 2013 national elections. There is a lot of harassment of women candidates who run for public office. There are several organizations that have documented the mistreatment and other obstacles women face in running for office. So in general we have made good progress, but we still have work to do—particularly in representing our viewpoints in government and policy-making bodies.
Kenya’s 2010 Constitution is one of the most liberal globally. It provides for at least one-third of public office holders to come from each gender—a good prescription for increasing women’s representation in the public domain. Unfortunately, implementation of this provision became contentious and by 2013, the case went all the way to the Supreme Court—and the verdict was the implementation would have to be attained progressively, or gradually. That was quite a setback.
The MOON: Ah yes. That sounds very similar to the struggle for women’s equality here in the U.S.
Muigai: Yes. Another aspect of life where things have not changed much is with regard to female education. While the middle class has access to education, in rural and urban poor families, the story is different. Most girls still cannot acquire a secondary school education because they are expected to work, to become primary caregivers for the family as children. For example, communities affected by HIV/AIDS send very few girl applicants for foundation sponsorship. When we ask why, it’s because most girls become caregivers of their orphaned siblings by the time they are eleven or twelve. Or, in many cases, even if one of the parents is still alive, they are often too sick to work, or to take care of things around the house, so it falls to the girls.
Other communities, as well, have their cultural barriers to educating girls. The Masai community, for example, has very rich cultural traditions, which we admire. But when it comes to education for girls, it is not widely valued. And it is not just the Masai; there are other communities in Kenya for whom education for girls is yet to be fully embraced.
I remember in particular one girl named Purity. At thirteen years old she qualified for acceptance and scholarship from the Hilde Back Education Fund into secondary school, but her father didn’t want her to go. He thought it was a waste of money and time to send a girl to secondary school, and in fact he’d already married her off to an old man. “If I go home, my father will have no food for me,” she told me. “He will tell me to go live with my husband.” She was such a brilliant young girl. She had done so well in school, despite living in a very difficult learning environment. It is heartbreaking to see a girl who is so hard-working and so talented and have to watch her opportunities being snatched away from her.
The MOON: So what happened to Purity?
Muigai: She wanted to go to school. She wanted to become a doctor. We helped her enter the school of her dreams—about three hundred kilometers from her home so that it would be very difficult for her father to come and take her. We made the arrangements, we worked with people from her community who were rights workers to accompany her from home, and we paid for her scholarship.
The MOON: That’s beautiful. You know, it was heartbreaking watching A Small Act and seeing the pressure the children were under to perform well on a single test, and to see how few of them were able to attend secondary school because, without a scholarship, their families couldn’t afford it. What will it take for every child in Kenya and other developing nations to be able to offer public education through high school to all their students?
Muigai: I think it is only a matter of commitment, of will. Kenya is not a poor country; Kenya is a rich country that can afford to educate its children if we make that our priority. So far, our priorities have been wrong. There is massive corruption in Kenya—and throughout the African continent—which expropriates resources that belong to all the people. Without corruption, we could easily afford to give all students a decent public education. This is what I see in so many African countries where I have worked. When I look at them critically I see so many refugee women and children displaced by war and not able to go to school—entire generations being wasted—because a few greedy individuals want to be the sole owners of the land, the diamonds, the minerals, the gold, the timber coming out of their country, and so they are willing to go to war over it. So it’s not a question of resources; it’s a question of how public resources are utilized. It’s a question of implementing enough checks and balances in government so that corruption can be halted.
The MOON: Is there a movement to see that happen?
Muigai: Yes, there is a strong movement in Kenya. It needs to gather more momentum, but there is growing awareness of the problem of corruption. We have a vibrant media that is exposing cases of theft of public funds, so these are promising signs. The situation is much better than when you were here in Kenya in 1985 when the president’s word was law and the state owned the television media.
We also need to value and compensate teachers far better than we do now. Teachers are very underpaid, with the result that many of them have to take on outside jobs to supplement their incomes.
The MOON: You and your cousin, Chris Mburu, were not wealthy when you founded the Hilde Back Education Fund. Can you tell us how that decision came about?
Muigai: No, we were not wealthy. The two of us were international human rights workers. It was Chris’s idea. He also enlisted other professionals in our village. He would challenge us all, “Remember how we went to nursery school and we had such a good time, playing, and having crayons?” (Which we never saw again when we went to public primary school.) “Maybe we should do something like that to help other children.” So we contacted one of our friends, George, who sacrificed five years of his personal development to get the Education Fund going—to talk to the villagers and explain to them that we had started a sponsorship program and what the criteria were. The biggest challenge at the time was to explain to our relatives and friends in the village that they couldn’t come to us and say, “You have to accept my child and get him or her a scholarship.” We had to make our criteria very clear and explain that, because we were small and had very limited funds, we could only help brilliant children from poor families. Because there are so many poor families, this was very difficult, as the film, A Small Act, shows.
The first year, in 2001, all we had was $2,000—we’d given $1,000 each. That was enough to sponsor three or four children in secondary school every year. We focused on children coming out of the ten primary schools around our village. We continued to contribute money every year. It was very informal; we didn’t have an office; but it worked.
These days we have one hundred forty-nine girls and one hundred ninety-three boys. We are just completing the 2014 intake for children who completed their KCPE in 2013. So by February, we will have more than four hundred students sponsored by the Hilde Back Fund.
The MOON: What has been the impact of educating girls in Kenya? How has life in your village changed?
Muigai: Honestly, the education of the African girl makes a dramatically phenomenal difference. When you educate a girl in an African village, in a refugee camp, you minimize her chances of being sexually abused, of exposure to AIDs, of early pregnancy, and of child marriage. Education truly enables an entire generation of girls to live longer. You reduce infant mortality rates, because children who are born to young uneducated girls have a much lower chance of survival due to the challenges their mother has to overcome. Education is really the only liberating tool for a girl, for a mother, for a community. Educating girls in Kenya has made a huge difference in terms of women being able to work, access resources, pay their bills, send their children to school.
I grew up in a family where my mother had absolutely no say in the family finances. If my father didn’t pay the bills, or give her money for food, if he went drinking with the money, that was it. My mother had no choice. But now in the village, the women engage in farming, trading, and join women’s self-help groups. Even those toiling in the coffee plantations determine how to use the wages they make for themselves and their children. That is because of the transformation we have made over the past decades through education and the struggle for women’s rights. The same is true in such life and death matters as women choosing their sexual partners, choosing to practice safe sex, to pursue their inheritance—there really is no way to adequately describe the difference that educating women has made in our country, and in our continent.
The MOON: I recently interviewed Somaly Mam, the anti-human trafficking crusader, and she described how when girls have no prospects for employment or making money, they’re valued less, so they’re not educated, so they’re sold into prostitution, so they’re valued less, and it’s a vicious cycle. We don’t value girls so we don’t educate them, so they have no prospects, so we don’t value them…on and on.
Muigai: Yes, it is a very vicious cycle. I was in Somalia in 2006 and there was a big deportation program out of the Kingdom of Oman of African migrants and refugees who had fled Ethiopia and Somalia. They were deported in cargo planes in the heat of northern Somalia. I remember these really young girls from Ethiopia, and the youngest of them made me set aside all of my training and career as a lawyer and just ask myself emotionally, What has led this young girl to this deprivation?These girls were pushed off the planes in Somalia and the police rounded them up. They didn’t pay any attention to the boys who were deported and pushed off the plane at the same time. They wanted to take these girls to the police station for no other reason than sexual exploitation. Fortunately I was working with a very dedicated man who was with a partner organization, the Danish Refugee Council. He and I quickly saw what was happening, and I said, “Oh no, no, no, no. I’ll take the girls,” and he said, “OK, I’ll take the boys.” So we got those children out of there.
Frankly, I didn’t know what I was going to do with them. I took them in my car to my office just to put them up for the night. Then I asked them, “Do you have a number I can call to find your people? Where do you come from?” I found out that they came from a most remote place in Ethiopia. This one girl wept so bitterly when I put her on the phone with her mother. She wept from the depth of her soul. I couldn’t understand the language they were speaking, but I could understand her deep, deep pain when she heard her mother’s voice. This was a child who had been torn away. She was a deportee from Oman, so obviously someone had trafficked her. I kept asking myself, at what age could she have been trafficked? Who could have convinced her parents, her community, her country not to protect her and keep her at home? So I fully agree with Somaly Mam. When one works in human rights and sees these children, it really brings the message home: Educating girls is a matter of life and death.
Anyway, we put these girls on a plane back to Ethiopia, but I couldn’t be sure that they wouldn’t be trafficked again, and that made me very, very sad.
The MOON: How do you personally go on in a job that exposes you to so much grief and heartbreak?
————————————————————————————–
Part 4:
Originally published on The Moon Magazine
Muigai: It’s a tough one. It’s tough because you see humanity at its very worst. I think back to when I was in school and I read about the Holocaust and the Second World War, and believed that the world had said, “Never again.” But obviously, the horrors continue. But once you know that the horrors exist, you can’t do nothing and pretend you don’t know. Fortunately I have a very supportive and loving family. I have a loving husband and three lovely children. My oldest daughter understands the work we do and why we do it, so that makes it easier. The other two are still too young. In fact, she sometimes challenges me by saying, “It’s taking too long for girls to get their rights in this world. You people are not working hard enough.” She watched a documentary about Ethiopian girls who are being married and having children at age fourteen or fifteen. She took it as my personal call. “You see? I told you! Look at these girls in Ethiopia. They are going to die!” So my family helps me to go on.
The MOON: As a United Nations human rights attorney, you’ve had a closer view than most of the problems that face the poor and conflict-ridden regions of the world. How does the status of women factor into the conditions of suffering regions? If women had a higher status, do you think we would not see some of the war and conflict that we’ve seen?
Muigai: Yes, absolutely. We talk about this a great deal in our work. If women had more representation in government there is no way we would see some of the problems we are seeing. I used to work in Accra, Ghana, which had one of the largest Liberian refugee populations. When Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who later became the president of Liberia—the first woman president on the continent of Africa—declared that she would run for office, the people laughed her off. They said, “Where are your guns?” She had no weapons; how could she run? But she ran on a message of peace and of mobilizing women, and I truly believe that the stability in post-war Liberia has had a lot to do with her leadership. Also that the women in Liberia, who had suffered so much during the wars, trusted her and came out for her. “This is our time” became their campaign song and their campaign slogan. Day and night they campaigned, even in the darkness and the rain, because Liberia is a very wet country, and because most of the country, which was just emerging from conflict, had no electricity. The women endured. They campaigned until she was in office. I honestly believe that the chances of Liberia sliding back into civil war are minimized with her as a woman leader; as a leader who had never commanded any militia; as a leader who has no interest in that kind of domination. She’s not inclined to violence or to conflict. The Nobel Committee apparently agrees, because they awarded her the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, along with Leymah Gbowee of Liberia and Tawakel Karman of Yemen, who were all recognized “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”
My work with refugee men and women also has convinced me that the peace process in war-torn countries will work much better with women equally accessing leadership positions.
The MOON: Why?
Muigai: War is very, very expensive—but it’s the women who bear most of the costs. For example, we have new conflicts in South Sudan and the Central African Republic. Although the fighters are primarily men, eighty-five percent of the refugees are women and children, and the stakes are so high for them. Their lives are completely disrupted, and the women fear for the safety of their children. They fear for the rape and sexual abuse of their daughters; they fear that their sons will be conscripted into militia groups; they fear that their children won’t get an education and will be fated to lives of crushing poverty. If women are in leadership, their interests will be different than men’s interests have historically been. They won’t be interested in how much wealth and power they can accumulate; they will be interested in ensuring that children go to school.
For me the courage I’ve seen among women in refugee camps, toiling day and night for the sake of their children, tells me a lot. The courage they demonstrate and the sacrifices they’re willing to make for their children show me their character—and it’s this selfless kind of character we need in leaders of our countries.
The MOON: What are the most difficult challenges facing young girls today?
Muigai: In Kenya, in Africa, in the refugee camps where I work, the biggest challenge is still access to education. They also face the threat of sexual violence and exposure to HIV/AIDS at a young age, when they are most vulnerable and don’t have access to reproductive health choices. They often are not even aware of sex when sexual violence happens to them. That is a big challenge. Another is the economic burden: the girls are primary caregivers and have too much responsibility for the entire family. They often have to take care of younger siblings and elderly grandparents, as well as fetch water, cook, clean, wash clothes, and all the rest. This is also a problem for many elderly, whose children have died of AIDS and who have inherited the care of their grandchildren. If their young grandchildren become pregnant—and early pregnancy is a big risk for orphaned girls—the grandparents now have a fourth generation to care for. In addition to early pregnancy, orphaned girls are at greater risk of dropping out of school, of not having any male protectors, of their grandparents not being able to pursue legal recourse if they are raped.
The MOON: That’s a daunting list of challenges. Is the HIV/AIDS crisis getting better, or have we just stopped hearing about it?
Muigai: It is getting better—people acknowledge and talk about it now. Condoms are discussed. Prevention is discussed. It is still very bad in the urban slums, though. Also, along the highways on the corridor between Mombasa and Nairobi a lot of young girls are exposed to it from truck drivers. This is a corridor cutting through some communities in abject poverty, so many girls are forced into underage prostitution to support their families.
The MOON: What are the most difficult challenges facing grown women in the regions where you work?
————————————————————————
Part 5:
Originally published on The Moon Magazine
Muigai: Economic opportunity is the biggest challenge. Access to higher-paying jobs is still very limited for them. For example, Africa is the “last frontier” in terms of industrialization, which means there are a lot of construction jobs. But these jobs do not go to women, but to men. This is not because women are not strong enough. They are willing to learn and engage in traditionally male-dominated jobs. But the training for these jobs still favors men over women. The next idea I want to seriously explore is training young disadvantaged girls in a range of construction-related skills, so that they can become electricians, plumbers, masons, etc., to work in the construction boom and raise their economic status.
Another challenge—particularly for poor women—is exposure to violence—sexual violence and domestic violence, in particular. Another challenge is access to quality health care. So again, it is all related to education. Without education, women can’t get out of poverty, can’t protect themselves from early pregnancy or too many pregnancies, can’t access health care or take advantage of the legal system, can’t ensure the education of their children, and then the cycle repeats itself. That is why the education of girls is such a major focus of the United Nations’ Millennium Goals for ending poverty.
The MOON: When Western women read or hear about the difficult—and sometimes horrific—conditions of women in Africa—from having to walk miles for fresh water, to clitorectomy, to the devastation of rape and other atrocities of war—it’s easy to wonder how African women cope. How do they go on? How do they deal with all that trauma? Do you know?
Muigai: For one thing, we live in very different worlds. Each woman’s choices are defined by her environment. But if one thing is clear to me, it is the determination of African women to transform the lives of their children. For example, a woman who is married off at age sixteen often has ten children by the time she’s thirty. She endures a lot. But her focus becomes the future of her children. As my husband pointed out to me when we worked with women refugees from Ethiopia and Eritrea who had been married off early, “By the time they are thirty, their hearts and minds are rock-solid with a single desire – that their children will live a better life.” I think the hope to see their children through is what keeps them going.
The other day, refugee women in one of the largest camps worldwide, Dadaab Camp in Kenya, told my colleagues they would return to their homeland of Somalia only if their children get an education. For many African mothers, like these refugees, they must do everything to prevent their daughters from living the same life that they had to go through. Nothing will stop them.
When I was a girl growing up, my mother constantly told me, “Go to school. You will not go through the same life I have gone through.” And that is the same message I pass on to my daughters. “Education is the liberating factor. You can take it anywhere in the world and it will work for you.”
The MOON: Thank you for that. I remember when I spoke with Nairobi women back in 1985, they were so committed to doing whatever they had to do so that their children could go to school and they could send money home to their villages. If their husbands threatened to beat them for working outside the house, or for not turning over the money from the children’s school fund, their attitude was, “Fine. You will beat me. But I will go to work, and I will send my children to school.” They would not be cowed.
Muigai: Yes, and I think that’s still true—that many women are supporting their children, and still sending money back home to their villages. I see a lot of that.
The MOON: Does it ever frustrate you that women in the U.S. and Western Europe are so complacent about the benefits we enjoy? When I was in college in 1973 I remember a visit from Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmuller, who told our film studies class, “American women are the most privileged women in the world. You have more opportunity and freedom than women anywhere, and what have you done with it? Very little.” She really challenged us to stop being so petty and self-absorbed. What do you say? Does it frustrate you that women in the developed world who have so much, often do so little to help women who have less?
Muigai: Yes, absolutely. The more I travel the world the more I marvel at the disparity between the privileges of women in the West compared to the lack of choice and opportunity women have in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere in the developing world. But I also see that the privileges and opportunities Western women enjoy are the result of the work they and their ancestors did to acquire them. And I realize that the hard work and sacrifices the people in the developing world are making will yield similar results for them.
Sometimes when I speak to policy-makers in the U.S. or Western Europe I think that they can and should do more to help the developing world. They should use their position and privilege to influence policy-makers in developing countries; they should do more to elevate women worldwide. This doesn’t require personal sacrifice. It requires holding their peers in developing countries accountable. When they give humanitarian aid, they should ensure it is not misappropriated. That it is invested in the right priorities, e.g. more money in education for women and girls. They should ask more questions about girls’ education. That is not difficult, but it sends a powerful message about what the developed world considers important. Of course that is a priority for me because I come from a village in Africa. But if I grew up in a town in Sweden, or the U.S., that thought wouldn’t be in my mind without being educated about it. And when I became educated about it, it still might not be my number-one priority. So I understand that we all have differing worldviews.
The MOON: What could women in the developed world learn from their struggling sisters elsewhere?
Muigai: I think they could recognize the sacrifices in terms of personal choices that women elsewhere have to make, and they could be appreciative of the choices they have fought to achieve. They have educational opportunity; they have the ability to put food on the table; they have the ability to plan their families. One of the things I would wish also is for Western women to waste less. When I go to a restaurant in the U.S. and I see the portions of food that are served and then thrown away, I am shocked. I think of refugees in many parts of the world who would enjoy a meal from what an American family throws away.
The MOON: What message would you like to give to women of the Western world on behalf of the women of Africa?
Muigai: To the women of the western world I would say, “Thank you to those who look beyond their national borders, to care, to reach out and to assist girls across the globe. It has transformed others’ lives. Sometimes many lives. It does make a big positive difference.’’ I would of course add, ‘’Do not look at us with pity. We have a vibrant women’s movement on the continent. You can join in this movement.” There are many ways you can help, not necessarily with money. You can influence the policies in your country and the decisions that are being made between your governments and our governments, and between your corporations and our governments. For example, you can encourage the elimination of child labor on plantations and in textile mills in Africa and Asia. That is very helpful. It is also very important is that all women of reproductive age should have access to health and family planning services and even sanitary materials. Western women could start a movement for corporations working abroad to be obliged to maintain better safety standards, to provide more than token schools and health clinics. If corporations understand that this is important to Western women and customers, they will adopt it. That makes a big difference in affording dignity to women and girls working for these Western corporations.
More western women could also join in encouraging their governments to forgive the debts owed by developing countries. Servicing the debt is not a burden on the wealthy, but on the poorest of the poor. Repaying national debt is robbing programs for education and basic healthcare, which are being cut back.
It would also be very helpful for western women to advocate for more foreign direct investment, rather than humanitarian aid. The humanitarian aid model hasn’t worked. It hasn’t changed the basic system that keeps creating new generations of impoverished people. In other words, rather than “sending those children a dime,” what we really need is investment in their villages—in schools, teachers, clean water, healthcare, and so on. What will help is a robust investment in economic opportunities for Africans in Africa, or for Asians in Asia. This will create more jobs, more income, and raise living standards more effectively than aid.
The MOON: The theme of this issue is GRRL Rising. You yourself are an embodiment of that theme. Would you like to say anything more about elevating women and girls?
Muigai: Just to remember that when we educate a girl, we have educated a village and we have transformed a country. Let us rise, let us support each other. Our sisterhood is truly global, so let us never tire of pursuing the opportunities that are within our reach to give girls an education.