MEET the MAASAI
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The Maasai people inhabit Southern Tanzania and Northern Kenya. About 1.5 million continue to live in their traditional ways in their ancestral homeland, herding cows, sheep and goats.
Maasai men once faced down lions, but now they protect them. Their main job is herding cows and goats. Maasai women still adorn themselves with unique and stunning beadwork. But sadly, traditional Maasai culture has been strongly patriarchal. Men have multiple wives, while women have few rights or privileges.
Our students come from two traditional Maasai villages near Kenya's Amboseli National Park, at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Maasai women build homes from ashes, dung, sticks and mud. The material hardens into walls that feel like fiberglass to the touch, and keep their homes cool.
Maasai villages are surrounded by a wide thorn fence to keep wildlife out. A second, inner fence surrounds the corral for their livestock to spend the night.
In traditional Maasai culture, livestock are both wealth and sustenance. Cows are only eaten during dire or celebratory times.
In 2012 we took this picture of little girls gathering wood for cooking fires. At that time, girls from the village were not generally sent to school past third grade.
Times are changing: Until 2015, most village girls had their exterior genitalia removed at puberty, in preparation for forced polygamous marriage to older men. As second or third wives, they effectively became household slaves.
FGM is illegal in Kenya, but it still occurs, especially in rural places. There, cutting is done without pain mitigation, using unsterilized implements. Infections, fistulae and other problems are common.
Child brides become women with little personal freedom. Their traditional role is to bear as many children as possible. Most are left with serious physical and/or emotional problems.
Those who marry as children remain illiterate and unable to speak the languages of Kenya (English and Swahili.)
They become young widows with no means of support except the kindness of others, as Maasai women have no right of inheritance.
In 2016, with our encouragement, Chief Angirri Kelembu declared his intention to end FGM in his village.
Our fund sponsored a community-wide celebration to mark the END of the hideous practice, and the BEGINNING of education for all village girls.
Ending child marriage was harder however. Maasai fathers told us the only way they can pay for their sons' education is by trading their daughters for cows in polygamous marriage.
This 9-year-old was scheduled for cutting and marriage in 2015. Happily, our donors changed her fate!
She's graduated from high school now. But you can see her here, in the blue shirt, after she became a student.
In 2026, we have 57 girls enrolled in highly rated boarding schools.
There, they have three meals a day, even when their parents cannot provide regular sustenance due to poverty, floods, or drought. They live in sex-segregated dorms, watched over by matrons, to make sure they are safe.