The Heart of a Kenyan Woman

“Today I’m going to teach you how to be like a Kenyan woman!”  

Usually Nina taught me how to bargain in Kiswahili at the market for the mwenyeji (local) price instead of the mtali (tourist) price, or how to tie my leso so my jeans wouldn’t show underneath. She also lended a trusted ear from time to time. But that day my language instructor, sometime fashion consultant, and confidante also became my life coach.

“You must learn to keep the things you see and hear out there,” she waved her hand through the dusty air, “from going down here.” She placed her hand gently on her chest, over her heart.

I’m sensitive, sometimes overly so, letting things bother me that don’t others. And in Taveta for HIV/AIDS training, the pressures of being in hot, bumpy buses, noisy hotels, and cramped matatus with all 51 of the other trainees for four days straight was getting to me.

My sister Pat commiserated. “Sounds like being on retreat 24/7 with all your co-workers,” she said when I phoned her from the Challa Hotel, where we were staying. “I don’t think I could do it.”

If it weren’t week seven of training – the home stretch – I might not have been able to do it either. I’ve never felt comfortable in or around large groups, preferring the intimacy of one-on-one’s and intimate coteries where people can get to know and accept me. But now I was feeling vulnerable; as much an outsider with the other volunteers as with the Kenyans.

Nina was sensitive, too, which made it all the harder growing up in a culture with such intense gender expectations. She knew what it felt like to be chastised, considered different and difficult just for asking hard questions or wanting to go to school. Now as an adult she was part of a program that helped rescue Masai girls from the horrors of FGM (female genital mutilation), child marriage, and other abuses and provide them with a proper education and hopefully, freedom. 

One day after Kiswahili class she asked my pal Trevor and me if we wanted to meet a young runaway she was planning to drive to a “safe house” in Nairobi that evening. It’s one thing watching a movie like “Desert Flower” or reading the African-inspired articles by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, and quite another to share chai with a sweet 16 year old and listen to the story in her own words, in a language I was then just starting to understand. So there, in a ramshackle hoteli in the middle of town, we listened as she recounted being kidnapped at 14 from school by a group of Marans (warriors) and dragged back to her family’s manyatta (compound) to be circumcised. When she resisted she was beaten so savagely that her mother grabbed a panga (knife) and threatened to kill herself if the beating didn’t stop. It did, but the circumcision went forward, and the girl almost died from the ensuing infection.

By the end her story, I was crying. So was Trevor. But our young narrator remained poised as a debutante, stronger than both of us.

“Being sensitive is who you are,” said Nina. “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be so giving.” Still, I had to work on some things, she told me. Like learning to keep the “things out there” – the gossip, the acts of others, the things that disturbed, scared, angered, or confused me - from penetrating deeper, into my heart and soul. 

I had to learn how to have a heart like a Kenyan woman. And that day, I started.