My sister helped found a weekend seminar for teenage girls called “The Promise.” It’s goal is to give young women Christian support and guidance, allowing them to make the best decisions possible for their lives. It’s not easy being a teenager. Society forces young women… sometimes when they’re just girls… into making decisions they’re probably not ready or equipped to make. I’m not sure, but I think the promise is meant to be part of a positive “rite of passage” from girlhood to womanhood here in the US. It’s a lofty and worthy goal in a community that’s surrendered most “rites of passage” for their teens over to peer or commercial control.
The young women pictured above, little more than girls themselves, know exactly what to expect at their rite of passage. The Maasai, like many other pastoral people groups in Africa, “circumcise” their girls before they spend time together- then time alone- and finally are married away to a much older man who may already have one or more wives. The “circumcision” now commonly referred to as “Female Genital Mutilation” (FGM) is a physical and expected “rite of passage.” It seems brutal and primitive to many in the developing world and it’s long been illegal in all of Kenya, however, the practice continues in full view today. You can read much more about it at www.maasaieducation.org, (MED), the group that hosted us into the interior regions of their homeland this year.
Lillian Seenoi, head of the FGM Rescue Project for MED, enters villages on wedding day and snatches young girls away from their community, families and waiting husband as if she were pulling them out of a burning building. Families that have already paid large dowries and waiting husbands are not amused and she often needs to enter the community with well armed assistance. There is no 911 to call and her work is being carried out hours away from Nairobi, where the laws against FGM were laid down. Still, people are aware that these rites are no longer legal and that marriage under the age of 18 is punishable by jail time in Kenya. When she leaves a village with an 11 or 12 year old girl in tow just moments away from a life that left education, career or something as simple as a monogamous marriage behind her, she feels little guilt.
Lillian is a hard working Maasai woman, from an educated family, with a supportive husband, father and brothers, working with her, who believe there is more for these children to discover than the burden of a child barer, water carrier, who always walks behind. They have a mission statement: “Reinventing the Maasai Woman through Choice and Voice.” It’s more than a slogan.
Once the girls are out of the village they are placed in a rescue house. Here they begin their new education. Together they go through new rites of passage. They learn that there is more for them than life in the village. They are invited to experience a wider world in computer labs. They’re trained and equipped to discover a career path. And most importantly, their families and community are invited in for a time of reconciliation. The ripping out on wedding day leaves scars: emotional, spiritual and financial. The people at MED realize and address these issues. The process is not short: it can take as long as several years. It’s not inexpensive: funding comes in from around the world. Tragically, it’s not wanting for participants: they sometimes have in excess of 100 girls in their rescue center at a time.
Kenya, like many nations in Africa, is divided; divided between those with an education and those without. Much of the developing world still struggles with the battle people like Lillian are fighting. We look to the undeveloped peoples and see something of the “noble savage” of the America’s who were brutally destroyed and wonder if this movement isn’t another form of “westernization” and eventually annihilation of cultures and people groups. MED sees it differently. They see it from the inside, looking out. Inside a culture that treats girls like women and women like property. Inside a culture controlled by the past and losing the strength of their youth. Inside a people of beauty and power, who once equipped with education and the tools of today, will carry the Maasai community into regions of new discovery.
Most days, it begins with the rescue of a little girl and the promise to carry her through to a new image of the Maasai woman: reinvented into a woman of choice, a woman with a voice, a woman with a future and a hope. Their work deserves our prayers. It’s happening on a shoe string budget, with women and men on a mission operating with nerves of steel. It’s lifting up “the least of these” in places most of us will never even dream existed. Check out their site today. I look forward to going back and sharing their work again soon. You can join me.
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