Ten years ago this winter, I was spending a semester in Kenya. I'm staggered by how much time has passed from those few months that shaped my world view and honed my passions. Below is an essay I wrote for my thesis about a little girl I met. I was twenty-one then, and though there was no way I could have--probably no benefit to anyone, and my thoughts were likely some by-product of neo-Colonialism masked as aid, etc, etc.--I have always wished in a small corner of my heart, that I could have adopted her. She was four or five or six and so would now be fourteen or fifteen or sixteen.
I thought of her last night while I held my friends' infant daughter, and I cannot fathom the time that has passed. I hope that she is well, and that her life has been, and will be, kind.
The issues that shaped her young life, they have not changed yet, I think.
For Serewa
Serewa has no parents. I ask, but everyone is quite sure that she is no one’s child. She must be about five or six years old, a small bean of a girl. At night, sleeping on the goatskins in Cosina’s home, Serewa curls up beside me. She snores lightly.
I cannot speak to her, this little girl who doesn’t let me out of her sight. She speaks Maa, the Samburu language. I can muscle my way through Swahili, but only by the skin of my teeth. So instead Serewa becomes my shadow, holding my hand tight and sitting close and we do not speak.
Serewa has no parents and seems more alone than the other children who run between Cosina and Josephine’s homes. These two women, the wives of a Samburu elder, take care of the girl. She is clean and clothed and fed, but sits to the side, furtively waiting for her turn, makes herself smaller. Cosina is proud and tender with her own children. Josephine has an infectious laugh, and her face lights up like a candle with her own sons and daughters.
Perhaps there are more orphans who live around the family settlement. Orphan doesn’t seem like the right word. Serewa is not begging for glue on the streets of Nairobi or sent to a workhouse like Dickens’ orphans or sold to a brothel like so many, too many, other little-girl orphans around the world. She is fine, safe and healthy, and surrounded by people who treat her kindly as one of their own, blood-kin if not blood-child. She may never be as loved as their own children are, but these women will keep her safe, and that is better than many.
And still, when we go to the well for water, the child’s stoicism melts my heart. The well is perhaps a mile away, near the school where Cosina and Josephine’s children go. The women load up with jugs and buckets and we walk to the water. Serewa, who does not go to school, comes along, lugging a jug that is a quarter of her size. She holds the jug in one hand, grips my hand with the other. I’ve got a bucket in my hand, want to take her jug and have her run like a wild thing, like a child. But I do not know the words to offer this, and so we walk. She skips beside me, looking up to smile shyly.
When we reach the well, amid the joking and clucking of the other women who’ve come for water, the containers are filled. Serewa’s jug is maybe two gallons. Filled, that’s about seventeen pounds. A strip of pink cloth is wound around the handle, and she undoes the cloth, loops it over her forehead. The tension of the cloth, of her neck, pulls the jug close to her thin back and she takes off nearly running back home. The jug bounces, faded yellow plastic against the brown and tan flowers of her dress, as her bare feet pound the red dirt with quick steps.
I’ve come to the Samburu district as one of the final cultural field trips of the semester in Kenya. The Samburu are culturally similar to the iconic Maasai of East Africa, the red-blanketed cowboys of travel brochures. They are a cattle culture, semi-nomadic. Historically, the men have taken the cattle herd grazing around the region, staying under the grass is thin and then driving the herd on for new pastures. The women stay home to raise children, crops, and flocks of sheep and goats. It is a polygamous society, hence both Cosina and Josephine being Lenamugi’s wives.
Polygamy, as practiced by the Samburu, is not the nightmare of oppression and fear that blares across the American news every so often. With the men gone for so much of the year, the women need each other, need someone to rely on, someone to talk to. The interdependence of the women, as if they barely noticed whether their husbands were present or not, surprised me. If anything, the men seemed out of place, uncomfortable in their wives’ lives, in their wives’ homes.
The houses, low-roofed huts made of goat dung and mud adobe on walls and frames of woven sticks, are the women’s. Cosina built her house just after her marriage, and she and Josephine spent a few hours reinforcing the roof while I was there.
I came to Samburu puffed up with indignation over the subjugation of women, the injustice of polygamy, and all the rest that a liberal girl from the States might find offensive. Sitting outside the hut, making beaded necklaces with the children, I watch Cosina and Josephine laugh as they smear mud over the cracks in the walls. Their husband, Lenamugi, and his brother who lived nearby wandered across the plains in the near distance. At least they had each other. The loneliness of men, back from the male companionship of cattle camps and catapulted into a sphere of life where they were nearly superfluous. Soldiers, back from a tour to duty to a home that was never their own.
The trouble is that the cattle camps have always been on public lands, were so before land titles and use were demarcated. And now, the land is being divided for private use, or further divided to protect from private use and exploitation. It all amounts to the same thing—access to the size and variation of public land necessary for cattle camps is disappearing. Without the land, there are fewer and smaller camps, fewer and smaller herds, and the Samburu men’s world shrinks.
The women, their world bound by the distances between their homes, water, and the forest, are less immediately affected by the shifting land. But as their husbands and brothers and sons are losing their identity as cattlemen, are staying home, emasculated by the loss of grazing lands, the women begin to feel the change. The changes crash into the women’s world, fists and infections breaking millennia of tradition. The diseases of unhappiness, of frayed social fabrics, alcoholism, domestic abuse, abandonment, all set in as the men settle and the lives they’d thought to live slip through their fingers.
When people are tied to a disappearing land, what happens to the people?
There is less land for fewer cattle, and some men leave the Samburu region. They head for settlements and cities, hoping for work and promising to send money to support their wives and children. Some disappear, some come home. Some come home, carrying AIDS from seeking comfort, seeking power, wherever they could find it in unfamiliar places.
Serewa has no parents. The most Cosina says is that her mother is dead and her father is gone. There are a thousand different ways this could have happened. And the story of land loss bleeding into human lives is as obvious as any news headline. We are bored of this story, heard it so many times we’ve stopped listening.
When I left Cosina’s house, I bent down to hug Serewa. Her thin arms around my shoulders, hot hands on the back of my neck—I can feel the heat and the pressure of her weight still. The skin absorbs, remembers, what ears no longer hear.
For Serewa
Serewa has no parents. I ask, but everyone is quite sure that she is no one’s child. She must be about five or six years old, a small bean of a girl. At night, sleeping on the goatskins in Cosina’s home, Serewa curls up beside me. She snores lightly.
I cannot speak to her, this little girl who doesn’t let me out of her sight. She speaks Maa, the Samburu language. I can muscle my way through Swahili, but only by the skin of my teeth. So instead Serewa becomes my shadow, holding my hand tight and sitting close and we do not speak.
Serewa has no parents and seems more alone than the other children who run between Cosina and Josephine’s homes. These two women, the wives of a Samburu elder, take care of the girl. She is clean and clothed and fed, but sits to the side, furtively waiting for her turn, makes herself smaller. Cosina is proud and tender with her own children. Josephine has an infectious laugh, and her face lights up like a candle with her own sons and daughters.
Perhaps there are more orphans who live around the family settlement. Orphan doesn’t seem like the right word. Serewa is not begging for glue on the streets of Nairobi or sent to a workhouse like Dickens’ orphans or sold to a brothel like so many, too many, other little-girl orphans around the world. She is fine, safe and healthy, and surrounded by people who treat her kindly as one of their own, blood-kin if not blood-child. She may never be as loved as their own children are, but these women will keep her safe, and that is better than many.
And still, when we go to the well for water, the child’s stoicism melts my heart. The well is perhaps a mile away, near the school where Cosina and Josephine’s children go. The women load up with jugs and buckets and we walk to the water. Serewa, who does not go to school, comes along, lugging a jug that is a quarter of her size. She holds the jug in one hand, grips my hand with the other. I’ve got a bucket in my hand, want to take her jug and have her run like a wild thing, like a child. But I do not know the words to offer this, and so we walk. She skips beside me, looking up to smile shyly.
When we reach the well, amid the joking and clucking of the other women who’ve come for water, the containers are filled. Serewa’s jug is maybe two gallons. Filled, that’s about seventeen pounds. A strip of pink cloth is wound around the handle, and she undoes the cloth, loops it over her forehead. The tension of the cloth, of her neck, pulls the jug close to her thin back and she takes off nearly running back home. The jug bounces, faded yellow plastic against the brown and tan flowers of her dress, as her bare feet pound the red dirt with quick steps.
I’ve come to the Samburu district as one of the final cultural field trips of the semester in Kenya. The Samburu are culturally similar to the iconic Maasai of East Africa, the red-blanketed cowboys of travel brochures. They are a cattle culture, semi-nomadic. Historically, the men have taken the cattle herd grazing around the region, staying under the grass is thin and then driving the herd on for new pastures. The women stay home to raise children, crops, and flocks of sheep and goats. It is a polygamous society, hence both Cosina and Josephine being Lenamugi’s wives.
Polygamy, as practiced by the Samburu, is not the nightmare of oppression and fear that blares across the American news every so often. With the men gone for so much of the year, the women need each other, need someone to rely on, someone to talk to. The interdependence of the women, as if they barely noticed whether their husbands were present or not, surprised me. If anything, the men seemed out of place, uncomfortable in their wives’ lives, in their wives’ homes.
The houses, low-roofed huts made of goat dung and mud adobe on walls and frames of woven sticks, are the women’s. Cosina built her house just after her marriage, and she and Josephine spent a few hours reinforcing the roof while I was there.
I came to Samburu puffed up with indignation over the subjugation of women, the injustice of polygamy, and all the rest that a liberal girl from the States might find offensive. Sitting outside the hut, making beaded necklaces with the children, I watch Cosina and Josephine laugh as they smear mud over the cracks in the walls. Their husband, Lenamugi, and his brother who lived nearby wandered across the plains in the near distance. At least they had each other. The loneliness of men, back from the male companionship of cattle camps and catapulted into a sphere of life where they were nearly superfluous. Soldiers, back from a tour to duty to a home that was never their own.
The trouble is that the cattle camps have always been on public lands, were so before land titles and use were demarcated. And now, the land is being divided for private use, or further divided to protect from private use and exploitation. It all amounts to the same thing—access to the size and variation of public land necessary for cattle camps is disappearing. Without the land, there are fewer and smaller camps, fewer and smaller herds, and the Samburu men’s world shrinks.
The women, their world bound by the distances between their homes, water, and the forest, are less immediately affected by the shifting land. But as their husbands and brothers and sons are losing their identity as cattlemen, are staying home, emasculated by the loss of grazing lands, the women begin to feel the change. The changes crash into the women’s world, fists and infections breaking millennia of tradition. The diseases of unhappiness, of frayed social fabrics, alcoholism, domestic abuse, abandonment, all set in as the men settle and the lives they’d thought to live slip through their fingers.
When people are tied to a disappearing land, what happens to the people?
There is less land for fewer cattle, and some men leave the Samburu region. They head for settlements and cities, hoping for work and promising to send money to support their wives and children. Some disappear, some come home. Some come home, carrying AIDS from seeking comfort, seeking power, wherever they could find it in unfamiliar places.
Serewa has no parents. The most Cosina says is that her mother is dead and her father is gone. There are a thousand different ways this could have happened. And the story of land loss bleeding into human lives is as obvious as any news headline. We are bored of this story, heard it so many times we’ve stopped listening.
When I left Cosina’s house, I bent down to hug Serewa. Her thin arms around my shoulders, hot hands on the back of my neck—I can feel the heat and the pressure of her weight still. The skin absorbs, remembers, what ears no longer hear.
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