MWEP

I. Summary

The Masai Women’s Empowerment Project (MWEP), founded in February 2008, is dedicated to improving the lives of the impoverished Merimbeti Masai women and children living in Athi River, Kenya. Our purpose is to provide meaningful interventions that respect cultural belief and historical experience, but still help to combat the incidence of hygiene-related disease, HIV/AIDS, child prostitution, pregnancy complications, hunger, poverty, and lack of education.

II. Introduction

In October 2005, the Watoto Pamoja (Children Together) Initiative was launched by Mr. Albanus Mwololo as a community-based organization. It struggled to gain traction until February 2008. At that time Watoto Pamoja Initiative sponsored the Masai Women's Empowerment Project and began to move forward, when Mr. Mwololo met Mr. Ed Colina, (a long time Catholic school administrator in Northern Kentucky) while both were working at the Nyumbani Village in Kitui, Kenya. Mr. Mwololo worked gratis from February to November. Mr. Colina kept busy balancing his responsibilities at Nyumbani; simultaneously raising substantial funds for the project through contacts in the United States. Mr. Mwololo, aided by Masai interpreters, conducted a baseline survey and a needs assessment. Mr.Mwolo’s research allowed insight and guidance toward current project and budget goals. In early November of 2008, Mr. Mwololo returned to the Masai settlement to update the census.

The funds raised by Mr. Colina allowed MWEP to respond when a drought left the Masai women and children in Athi River starving while they waited for the men, who had ranged far in search of grass, to return to the manyattas with the cattle. Mr. Mwololo and his contacts assessed the need for emergency food relief at each manyatta and over the course of four separate distribution trips, he and Mr. Colina delivered maize flour, rice, porridge meal, and powdered milk that sustained the communities until their cattle herds returned.

In October of this year, MWEP had raised sufficient funds to pay Mr. Mwololo for his time and to begin to address the other planned interventions. One short-term solution involves purchase of a piece of land from the owners to build a semi-permanent Early Education Center. MWEP has purchased uniforms, textbooks, and paid the school fees, allowing the children to commence or continue their education. Also planned is a training program for Traditional Birth Attendants.

III. Needs and Problems

Of Kenya’s 42 tribes, the Masai are one of the most well known, particularly since they offer a glimpse of traditional Kenyan culture, while the rest of the country strives for development and modernity; they continue to herd indigenous cows, goats, and sheep. Though they have been pushed out of their ancestral grazing lands in the fertile Rift Valleys by farming tribes, Masai men, known as Morans, wander in search of green pastures for their herds. The women, who occupy a submissive role in Masai culture, remain in settlements known as manyattas to raise the children.

After being forced off their traditional home, the Masai became disparate, settling wherever grass and water could be found. One of the places they settled is the industrial district of Athi River, 35 km Southeast of Nairobi and situated along the Mombasa Road which connects the capital to the coastal center of Mombasa. Factories, including the London Distilleryand Banburi Cement, occupy much of the adjacent land. In 1993, a group of Masai congregated here and formed the Marimbeti Village. The land on which they live is owned by private investors, but goes unused, and the Masai have squatted on the land since they arrived. Currently, there are approximately 2,000 Masai living in five separate manyattas throughout the region.

While the men are away with the herds, the women and children are left alone to face tremendous difficulties. The general health of the community is extremely poor. Out of every 10 children, 8 have some sort of eye, ear, nose, or throat infection. Eye infections are the most common. House flies hover in and around the eyes and nose of most children, but they are not brushed away because flies are a symbol of wealth, given their association with cattle, and the culture forbids killing them. Two children are now partially blind and eight report, “aching ears.”

As noted above, the Masai are “squatting” on the land and do not own it, so they are forbidden to build any permanent structures. Their houses are made of wood branches, cow dung, and polythene papers. The landowners consider a latrine/toilet to be a permanent structure so the inhabitants must relieve themselves in nearby thickets. Cases of cholera and dysentery are prevalent; cholera has taken the lives of four adults and two children.

Nutrition and food hygiene are also of great concern. The Marimbeti Masai continue to rely on the traditional staples: milk, blood, and meat for their nutrition. The meat is usually eaten raw or undercooked, and the blood and milk are rarely boiled before consumption. Many women and children suckle directly from a cow while milking it and the men lance the cows and drink the blood directly from the open wound. These practices account for the presence of animal-related diseases like Brucella. Drinking water, obtained from a polluted Athi River nearby, is consumed without being boiled or treated. Water-born diseases like typhoid and schistosomiasis (bilharzia) are common. Nearly every child below the age of 14 suffers from intestinal worms. The net result is widespread disease, especially among the children, who appear lethargic, with bloated faces and stomachs, and brown hair.

Poor hygiene exacts a further toll in the form of infant and maternal mortality. During the short periods when a Masai man is home, he demands a physical relationship from his wife, to which she is obligated to submit. Women are encouraged to, and typically do, give birth each year. Each pregnancy poses a great danger to both mother and child. Receiving pre- or post-natal care from a hospital is, by cultural norms, discouraged; additional obstacles include the proximity and expense of such services. Children are delivered by birth attendants, who operate well below hygienic standards. Traditional herbs are often toxic to the fetus and cause a miscarriage. Prolonged labors or breech births typically end in the death of mother, child, or both. Those children who do survive are often weak, unhealthy, and not vaccinated against diseases like tuberculosis, measles, or polio. The one woman interviewed in the Baseline Survey who had attended a clinic did so because of profuse vaginal bleeding, but after the 9 km walk she arrived too late for the nurses to help and she lost the child, for which she was severely punished by her husband. At the time of the survey, the village had lost five expectant mothers, their deaths arising from complications during pregnancy.

As in many poor Kenyan communities, HIV/AIDS is a constant threat. The Nairobi-Mombasa highway, along which the Marimbeti Manyatta is located, has long been known to be a primary transport mechanism for HIV/AIDS. Long-distance truck drivers shuttling goods between the coast and the capital often pay for sex from women or girls picked up along the way. The Marimbeti women, left alone with no way to generate income save prostitution, are particularly vulnerable. So, too, are the young girls who must often beg for food in nearby Athi River Town. As they are culturally programmed to be submissive to men, these young girls are unlikely to resist their sexual advances, offered in exchange for food and girls as young as ten are married off by their parents. Unhygienic practices during childbirth and lack of modern pharmaceuticals ensure that diseases like HIV carried by the mother are usually passed on to her child. These risks are compounded by the community’s reticence to discuss HIV/AIDS, and by the infrequency of medical attention, due both to fear of stigma and lack of resources. The result is a large proportion of women who show symptoms of HIV (low weight, presence of opportunistic infections) and a growing number of AIDS orphans and widows who are cast from the community to face a life of loneliness and neglect. The low self-esteem of these women and children make them particularly vulnerable to the sexual advances of men passing through the village.

Education is often the best and most expedient path toward improvement but this is an equally complex and difficult problem. First, simply getting to school is a problem, as the nearest is an 8km walk away and involves crossing the busy highway. To date seven children have been killed by vehicles while crossing Mombasa Road. This contributes to many Marimbeti Masai children not going to school until the age of ten or eleven. These students are far behind their peers and are placed in classes with much younger students. In addition, many are sent home from school for lack of books or uniforms. Of the 326 children observed in the Baseline Survey, nearly all needed new uniforms and 198 went to school virtually naked. These factors have a powerful negative impact on self-esteem and, school performance. Girls are further disadvantaged. A Marimbeti Masai girl must complete a number of chores before beginning the trek to school. If she has any brothers, they are given first priority in the purchase of books and uniforms. The Masai lack the resources to pay for remedial classes. Few reach Standard 8 (eighth grade) and even fewer attend high school. Those that do, must attend sub-standard schools with poor teaching and low-quality facilities, if any. Those children who do attend school do not return home before 7 pm, by which time it is dark. Some of the younger children located in two of the mnyattas may attend a nursery class in the only permanent structure in the village which doubles as a church. However, this structure is entirely unsuitable for the purpose it is meant to serve. The furniture on which the children play is poorly constructed and high off the ground; there is no table and no blackboard; wind and cold easily penetrate the metal-sheet walls; the floor is gravel, the ‘trainer’ in untrained and the school operates more as a daycare than in an academic setting. Nearly all of those children above the age of 12 who do not go to school (and all children on weekends) can be found in Athi River Town begging, further exposing girls to sexual advances that they are unlikely to refuse, especially when offered food. This street culture promotes gang activity, theft, and promiscuity.

The poverty that necessitates begging occurs as a result of a lack of personal income for the women of Marimbeti. Though skilled in beadwork, they lack the start-up money to purchase materials and the ability to transport their product to market. Left to shoulder the full responsibility of child rearing without financial stability, many women depend on begging, prostitution, or outside support from groups like MWEP. Such dependence greatly undermines self-esteem and impedes empowerment.

IV. Goals/Objectives

· To improve the general health status of the community within culturally permissible parameters through education concerning hygiene, disease prevention, HIV/AIDS awareness, and pre/post natal care.
· To provide emergency food, when necessary, in order to ensure that women and children do not have to prostitute themselves or beg to eat.
· To provide the opportunity for education to those children and adults who desire it.
· To make available means for the women of the community to feel agency in their own lives and futures.

V. Interventions

MWEP is acutely aware that interventions formulated and presented without reference to the cultural, political, and historical experience of this Masai community have no chance of success. We believe that the interventions proposed here will address the problem areas discussed previously, but we feel strongly about the importance of working together with members of the Marimbeti Masai to shape current solutions and develop new ones that best fit the needs of the community within the confines of acceptable cultural practice. By involving the community, we hope to avoid projecting a Western value or belief system onto others while still helping girls and women avoid exploitation and providing opportunities, rather than mandates, for education and Western medical care.

A. General Health, Hygiene, and Pre/Post Natal Care
1. Conduct routine health screenings. In October 2008 Mr. Mwololo's Masai contacts expressed an interest in having periodic medical screenings. A month later, MWEP located a British physician affiliated with the Volunteer Service Organization (VSO) and screenings were begun.
2. Petition government to bring mobile pre/post natal clinics to the 5 Masai manyattas.
3. Initiate an HIV/AIDS awareness program
4. Initiate a nutrition program in pre-school and nursery classes.
Our hope to introduce pre-school and nursery classes, dovetails with a nutrition program, as sound nutrition is vital to supporting developing brains.
5. Training of Traditional Birth Attendants in hygienic and safe methods of childbirth.
6. Instruction in hygienic preparation of traditional foods and water.
7. Petition Ministry of Health, Lands, and Settlement to address lack of toilet/latrine.

* Note: Training sessions on Early Childhood Education, hygiene & HIV/AIDS awareness, led by Ed Colina and Albanus Mwololo , began in December 2008.

B. Youth
1. Purchase of uniforms and books and payment of school fees.
2. Construct preschool and nursery school classes at the manyatta site; teacher training
3. Initiation of clubs and organizations to involve children in constructive activities.
4. Counseling of young girls to resist sexual advances for food and money. This intervention will require considerable collaboration with parents in order to present the information in a culturally sensitive manner.

* Note: Purchase of school uniforms and books and payment of school fees, began in January 2009.

C. Empowerment
We do not define "empowerment" as converting Masai women to the lifestyle or value system adopted by Western countries nor do we have any interest in doing so. Instead, we seek to help the women find their own positive sense of self by providing opportunities for income generation for the older women and education for the children. Empowerment is especially important for the young girls, in order to protect them from exploitation. We seek to address three levels of empowerment:

- Individual: By knowing their rights as people and women, the female Masai may be less vulnerable to demands from men that may be unhealthy.

- Family: Masai women can use their traditional management of family matters as a platform to discuss areas of need or concern.

- Group: The creation of self-help or co-operative groups would provide income generation through the making and selling of beadwork. We would provide initial seed money for the purchase of materials.

D. Partnerships and Linkages
1. Apprise neighboring factories and companies of the presence of the Masai communities and ask for their assistance.
2. Ask the local community to help support the settlement.
For example, helping the children cross the busy highway to attend school.

VIII. Evaluation

The success of our interventions will be determined through ongoing surveys, which will be extremely useful when compared to the baseline. It will give us the ability to determine whether our objectives and goals are being achieved. It will be quite simple to determine the relative success of the more quantifiable objectives, like the incidence of disease and child mortality, or amount of children that are regularly attending school.
The less quantifiable objectives, of increasing empowerment and self-confidence in the women of Merimbeti will be better determined through program director Mwololo Albanus’ ongoing contact with the community.
We are expecting that some interventions will work better than others and we plan on adjusting or replacing our programs in order to achieve the desired result. We will look to ourselves and the Merimbeti Masai, for continuing refinement.

The problems this community faces are numerous and they will not dissipate quickly. We anticipate this process to be difficult and prolonged, but those of us aware of the severity of this problem, whether on-site or in the United States, are determined to counter each difficulty with resolve and patience. We ask for financial support from those who are able and believe this cause to be a worthy one. All our effort and determination will go for nothing without the continued generosity of donors.

Thank you for your consideration.

Tax-exempt contributions may be sent to:

IMMACULATE HEART OF MARY MISSION FUND
Africa Projects
5876 Veterans Way
Burlington, KY 41005

Questions or concerns? ecolina@aol.com