True Story: Maasai Women

After a few days of being around the Maasai village in Kenya, the true stories of life there started to come out. The first thing I noticed was that when a woman told you how many children she had, she typically used two numbers: how many children total, and how many are still alive. They were numbers like 8 and 5, 14 and 9, 7 and 6.

When I hung out with the young girls (basically teenage girls who are not yet married, which is the Maasai standard for adulthood) it was hard at first to figure out why they grimaced and avoided the subject when I asked if they were going to get married.

In the middle of the week, in a crazy amazing outpouring of the Holy Spirit among the women's cooperative, the women on our team found out why. The women's stories started coming out, and most had the same pattern. Their fathers forced them to get married so they could acquire more cows. In order to get married, they had to get circumcised, which is not a good thing for women. Both forced marriage and female circumcision are against the law in Kenya now, but they still do it secretly.

Most women have also been raped many times, are rarely safe, and are not exactly treated well by their husbands. There are actual witch doctors in Kenya, and the spiritual darkness in the country is more blatant in the West, so the women often also deal with significant spiritual oppression whether they are Christian or not. On top of that, it is their role to do just about everything, including raising the children, getting water, working crops, and feeding everyone. It's hard for them to keep their children alive, let alone send them to school or think about the future.

Some women try to escape from this life, either by running away from home, or, if they're lucky, through higher education. We met a few of them. The girls I worked with had not yet reached this point, but were not looking forward to it. It was actually hard to talk to them at first because basic American conversation is so success, future, and prosperity oriented. After going through names, ages, number of brothers and sisters, and how many years of school they completed, there wasn't a lot more to talk about. "A future" is not really something they think about, and hope, outside the eternal hope of heaven, is not even considered. They try to eat, survive, and avoid pain along the way. Knowing all this made their joy and love all the more spectacular. More about that soon...