This oral history interview with Peninah Nthenya Musyimi took place on November 8th, 2023, and was conducted by Peg Spitzer, Ayuska Motha, and Leslie Janoe. It lasted one hour and twenty-one minutes.
Out of everyone we’ve interviewed, you’re the first one who’s in an urban environment, which is interesting for us. Since we’re heavily involved in climate change, the first question we want to ask you is how climate change has impacted your community; when you first noticed this; and if you could speculate on what you think future impacts might be.
I would say climate change has really impacted my community in many negative ways. We live in an urban center, an informal settlement that is one of the poorest communities in the city [Nairobi]. One of the impacts of climate change is rural-to-urban migration. A lot of young women (and also older women and children) are moving from their rural homes because their lands are dry, the rivers have dried, and the seasons have changed dramatically. It’s not like the usual planting season—every time, everything is changing. When they expect rain, it’s sunny; and when they expect sun, it’s raining. This has really affected the planting seasons in the rural homes and the wells and rivers have dried, too, and this is forcing them now to start scrambling to move into the cities in search of livelihoods.
By moving into the cities, the only place they can come that is affordable is the slums—informal settlements that lack good housing infrastructures. The houses are made from iron sheets and mud in a very congested environment. The congestion creates more insecurity especially for women because they end up getting [sexually] abused by men in the community, which means they will end up with unwanted pregnancies and will give birth to illegitimate children and spread diseases including HIV in the community. These are some of the effects of climate change in my community for young women and girls. In search of a livelihood, they become vulnerable to abuse. Climate change started taking its toll in 2018 when we realized that the seasons were not the same anymore—we were wondering why there was an influx of so many rural people coming to our settlements every day. In 2018, we began thinking about how we could support these people coming from their rural homes to, you know, give them hope and give them a livelihood. We just try to intervene in their situations in the Mathare slums.
Could you speculate on what you think the future impacts might be?
I think in the future we could have deserts in rural areas to the north because the seasons have changed. We never know when the rainy seasons will be and that means nutrition is going to be affected. I foresee death for people who are not able to come to the cities and look for jobs or have means of coming to the cities to find alternative livelihoods. They’re going to be dehydrated or die of hunger and that’s one effect I see for the future. I also see deserted ancestral lands. Most people in the rural homes own spaces that were left by their ancestors and, if these farmlands are not productive, what’s going to happen to them?
Could you possibly speculate in terms of numbers? Approximately how many people are affected now and how do you see that increasing?
I would say that in the present day, in a month, more than 30 women a month move from the rural homes to the Safe Spaces community within Nairobi’s informal urban settlement of Mathare. In the future, we could have more than 100 people in a month moving to my community. I’m talking about my community because we have already noted that 30 women a month leave their husbands or their rural matrimonial homes (and separate completely from their husbands). Once they come, they bring their children and some even leave their children. Most of the women are coming with their children to the city.
How far is it for them to travel?
I would say 70 kilometers or 100 kilometers. These are the rural homes that are near the cities. For those who live very far from the cities (like 300 kilometers or 400 kilometers), it is very hard for them to come to the city. We’re getting people who live between 100 to 170 kilometers from the city.
Can you describe your work and how you became involved?
My work involves creating safe spaces for young women and girls and the community as a whole—to paint their future life, to pursue the future they want for themselves—to have a place where they can dream afresh and you know have hope that their dreams can be achieved and provide assistance towards them going through their path.
I grew up in the Mathare slums. I’ll talk about my background a bit growing up in the slums. I lived in the slums for 20 years. As a young girl, I grew up in really harsh conditions—no running water or electricity, no toilets, poor infrastructure, and small houses (10 by 10-foot homes that were built of paper, mud, and old iron sheets that do not keep out the rain most of the time.) My family was so poor that we would starve most of the time. Neither of my parents went to school and my dad had been brought up traditionally especially in the attitude of keeping girls at home. I’m the first one in a family of four children and the second one is a girl, too. Our tradition is that when girls reach a certain age, they should be married off. In the patriarchy, we are educated to believe that boys get wealth for themselves. My dad moved into the city (Nairobi) just like other people during the construction of the Kenya-Uganda railway. He was among the laborers who came into the city to look for railway jobs. (Since then, there has been an influx of rural people severely affected by climatic changes who moved to the urban cities.) The government put the laborers in informal infrastructures because they needed cheap labor and that’s how the slums got started. Originally, it was just a small place to sleep but the workers then developed families. Since they didn’t have any information and were illiterate, they held onto their traditional thinking that a woman is supposed to remain illiterate, stay at home, cook, get married, and give birth.
At nine years old, I realized that we were going through a lot of hardships in that congested community and there were no role models. It was just like a confinement because people in the other houses also were facing the same challenges so there’s no one you can go to and ask for help. There was a lot of fighting, domestic violence, high prostitution rates, high drug rates, and illicit brews. That’s the kind of environment we were growing up in. The only life for the girls is to get married to the boys next door and start families. That’s how they create slum families. I observed domestic violence and all the vices and bad things that happened in the community.
I thought that there must be a different life somewhere else because, just across from the slums, there was a road that divides middle-class areas from the Mathare slums called Juja Road. In the middle-class area, there are stone houses and people are a bit well off. They can afford basic needs as opposed to us who are just confined and in the slums with nothing. The church was across the road—just in that middle class area—and I used to go to church with my sister and, every time we would cross the road, I would find all the food thrown into dustbins. And the people had nice clothes and they had shoes. I was barefooted and we rarely wore anything new. And we were hungry. I started asking myself—just talking to myself—like why do we have this difference? Why do these people have food? Why do these people wear nice clothes? Why must our lives be so different? I was just brainstorming within myself.
One day I asked the priest, Father Grol in the church why we are starving in the community. We go without food for three days and, even on the 4th day, we’re not sure we’re going to get something. The priest just wanted to be nice to me. He didn’t want to tell me things that would hurt me because he saw I was already hurt and so disturbed by the living conditions. Even when we went to the church, we would sit next to people, and they would just move away from us. I didn’t realize why: I thought maybe they didn’t like us because we came from the slums. But, eventually, when I grew up, I realized that we hadn’t taken a shower for almost a week and maybe we were smelling. We are in the church and these people are just moving away from the smell.
Anyway, I talked to a priest and asked why all these people have food and nice clothes and shoes and we are not having anything. He told me if you want to get all these things that you’re seeing, you must go to school. I thought when I go to school it’s just “grabbing and going.” I would just grab all the food that I don’t have, grab a few clothes, grab shoes, and then I would just look like the other people. This was nine-year-old thinking. I didn’t know the priest meant that I needed to go to school and learn and get an education to work and get money. I told him to take me to school, that I want to go to school tomorrow, you know, the next day because I really wanted to grab all those things and go back home and be nice like every other person. He did take me to school the next day because I was so persistent, and I kept on reminding him after Sunday school: “I want to go to school tomorrow.”
When I entered the class, I found pupils in desks and the teacher and the blackboard and chalks and then the priest left. I said to the teacher that I was told when I come into this class that I’m going to grab new clothes and food (because we are starving). The teacher told me, no, that’s not what the priest meant: “The priest meant you come to school, you learn, you get skills, and then you get a job. You get your own money and then you can buy all these things that you see people having outside there.” Then I asked the teacher how long that will take, and she told me: “You have to be in primary school for eight years, four years in secondary school, and then go to the university to get a skill and become a professional. Then, you look for a job.” Altogether, that’s like 16 years! Then, I thought, looking back at where I was coming from—with all the domestic violence and all the bad things that were happening in the community—what would be the best choice? I thought that the 16 years would work better for me because I could get away from all those things that I didn’t like and put all my energy into that. So, I chose to be in school for 16 years because I knew that if I finish this stage, my life would be different. I’ll get all the other things people are getting instead of just despairing and staying in the community and just becoming another slum statistic.
So that’s how I started my school and I put all my energy in classwork because I knew that it was one of the steppingstones towards my dream—to become a lawyer and advocate for women who are being beaten and treated badly in the community. Actually, I wanted a power that was bigger than the man because I thought the man was the ultimate king and he had the power to do everything to a woman and the woman is not supposed to say anything. So, I was looking for a power that would beat man. It was “justice” if a man can be thrown into jail or if he gets a beating like the way he beats the woman in the slums, then I’ll be happy. He would get his equal share.
That was why I wanted to change my community.
I passed my primary school, and I was called to join a secondary school for four years. The school was really very nice—a boarding school—and they were charging USD 160 (16,000 Kenyan shillings) per year. I had never seen money like that. While I wanted and needed to go to the “second stage,” my parents couldn’t support me. I didn’t have anyone in the community who could help me and even the church never offered scholarships. However, the government did give bursaries (partial scholarships from the government) to bright students and so I went and asked for help. My parents didn’t know anything like that but because I really wanted to change my life, I looked for all the avenues that could change my situation. Finally, I went to the local Chief who said that the bursary he could give me was 2000 Kenyan shillings. But that was not enough to go to the boarding school where I had been called. The local chief promised that, for the four years, he was going to pay the 2000 shillings fees every term; we had 3 terms in a year.
I kept brainstorming. I used to talk to myself so much, just asking myself what to do next. Eventually, I had to find a school where the tuition was 2000 shillings, and I could use the money that the Chief promised me. However, the school was a 16 kilometers (about 10 miles) walk from our home. I couldn’t even go back to ask my parents for money for bus fare because they didn’t have any money. Again, I couldn’t bother my father who was so patriarchal. He just knew about girls getting married and that wasn’t something that would go well with him. He would tell me to stop, stay at home, and wait to get married, and that was not something I wanted to hear! So my feet became my vehicle to school. For four years, I would get up early in the morning and walk to school for 8km and walk back in the evening another 8km to get my secondary education. I started looking at my challenges as a stepping stone towards my dream. I finished and passed very well, and I was called to join the university.
Joining the university was a bit easier because I was in the last step of my dream. I applied for the bursary for higher education and got 70% [of the tuition]. But my parents would have to raise 40,000 Kenyan shillings for me to complete the fees! That was a big challenge. In my quest to find a solution to the missing fees from my parents, I heard of basketball scholarships offered at the University and that trials were due in one month.
In my community, basketball was unheard of because it’s not a sport that slum people can afford. There are no basketball courts. Soccer is popular because it can be played with polythene balls. Soccer is always popular so that’s what I was used to seeing people play. I had never heard of basketball, but I thought I could try it even though it required a great deal of effort: I had to find a basketball court because I thought that’s the easiest thing I can do and with my own effort. The only basketball court was in a church 4km from our home in the middle-class area across Juja road. I became a member of the church to access the basketball court because this was really the only choice I had to solve that problem. I did learn basketball within that time frame: I learned layups and shooting three pointers. Just basic basketball because it was not a sport that was popular in Kenya. During the trials, I went back to the back of the line to watch because I thought I hadn’t learned enough within that one month. But we had to do layups, 10 three-point shots, and 10 free throws. That was what I had been practicing for that one month and I thought I could do it better than anybody. When it was my turn, I only saw the 40,000 shillings that I was supposed to raise to get the scholarship. Thinking of my dream coming true after four years was really very exciting and so I didn’t see that as a challenge. When it was my turn I went for the 10 layups and made all of them. I successfully shot 10 free throws and 10 three-point shots and got the scholarship. That’s how I was able to pay for the fees that my parents were supposed to top up for me to study in the university.
I studied at the university for four years and graduated with a law degree. After graduation, I worked for almost 7 years to support my family. I educated my siblings and relocated my parents from the slums into their rural lands to become farmers. With the money I got from working, I built them a small house and bought cows, goats, and chickens, both male and female, to restart their lives because that was a better place than just living in the slums where it was so harsh. I remained with my siblings and took them to school and paid their school fees with the money I had saved.
But my dream was to give justice to the women in the slums who are being violated and abused. In my last year as an attorney, I asked if there was some way that I could be paid by the government to advocate for poor people who cannot afford a lawyer. A lot of negative things were happening in the slums but the people I talked to said that, if people want justice, they need to pay for it themselves. But where would they get money to pay for it themselves? I was there and I know how it feels to be there so I said that I needed to do something bigger than just representing individuals: I need to empower these women so that they also don’t need a lawyer, so that they know their rights and can speak for themselves. If they are economically empowered, then they can stand up for themselves just like I did—because I was the only girl who had graduated from the slums. By that time, everybody had succumbed to the harsh realities of the slums and, being alone as a graduate and raising my voice by myself, I didn’t have much impact.
I wanted to empower 10,000 women in the slums so, in 2008, I started the Safe Spaces program for girls. My goal was to empower girls to give them skills and make sure they go to school, to get an education, and become knowledgeable to eventually become self-reliant. That’s the only way they could get freedom from all the issues that were happening with men, that’s the only way they could stay away from abusive relationships, and that’s the only way they could stay away from domestic violence. They would have power to make decisions and lead their community. They would change the community. I started with seven girls in 2008 and by 2010 I had 500 girls and now (2023) we’ve grown to 2000 girls in the program.
That’s very impressive and inspiring. How many people would hear this story and just say that if she can do it, then we can, too. I think you also answered the third question of background and education.
Yes, I’m a part of the community that I serve. I’m the girl of the community.
Just to clarify, you finished high school and then went to college and then, after college, to law school. Is that correct?
No, I went directly to law school in university after high school in Nairobi.
Okay, and you said you worked for about 7-8 years after that. Where did you work?
I worked at a legal firm in Nairobi where we did advocacy work and took cases to the court. I did criminal law, and I was employed at a legal firm in Nairobi.
Could you tell us a bit more about the work you do that focuses on the environment [climate change] for Awesome Blossoms?
Yes, as I mentioned, in 2018 in 2019, we realized there were changes in the climate. The rivers were drying and there was this influx of people from rural areas into our community. We started brainstorming again. We always look for solutions within our reach and we started dreaming about starting an urban oasis where we could grow food. In the urban centers, we partnered with a company called Hydroponics Africa where they grow food without using soil but use minerals instead: Food grows within a shorter period and it doesn’t use a lot of water, so we’re going to conserve water, and it uses less space. We have circular gardens that can be in a specific area. The vegetable crops take 45 days to grow. You only must water them like three days a week so there’s conservation of water in this environment management.
At first, we thought we’d do them inside the slums. We tried hanging gardens for people in the community in 2018 but it didn’t work due to poor water conditions. The sewage and the piped water are mixed sometimes, and the water is not dependably very clean. Also, because it’s a new technique, people just added dirty water to the plants. We thought that this was not sustainable. People didn’t understand the importance of having such greenhouses in the slums and would just waste them. Even the drunkards and drug addicts would destroy them. So, we partnered with schools because, in the schools, there’s space and there’s clean water because the government gives clean water to the schools. We partnered with the schools where we already had outreach programs on reproductive health. Some of the schools gave us space on the condition that we teach kids about farming, about conserving water, about taking care of the environment. We also share some of our gardens with them to give kids in the school supplemental food because they have lunch in their schools. We partnered with two schools and created 300 circular gardens in each school. (600 circulars in 2 schools)
In 2019, we were still piloting the urban oasis by growing crops and forming three women’s groups so that they could start participating in farming activities. Each women’s group had about 20 women (a total of 72 women were participants in the pilot, each with a circular garden (for a total of 72 circular gardens) and they established a constitution, a chair lady, and a treasurer. The purpose was that these women could support each other because of all the abuse they go through in their communities AND they can make some money and get some food for themselves—to sustain their lives. There were another 478 circular gardens that were cared for by Safe Spaces Peer Educators and another 50 circular gardens at each of the two schools that were dedicated to provide vegetables for school lunches. The model we are creating is that part of the profit will be for funding the Safe Spaces programs. Whatever profit we make from what we sell from the gardens dedicated to Safe Spaces would go to support the Safe Spaces nonprofit programs, so it forms a cycle. We started with a farm at one school and then, after 2019, we had another farm at another school, but we needed to scale up to five farms make it profitable.
So, we had two farms before we got the grant from FAWCO to develop three more farms for Safe Spaces and the women. During our pilot stage, we trained 15 Safe Spaces Peer Educators and 72 community women as micro-entrepreneurs as both pioneers of hydroponics farming and as mentors for the other women who are coming in. Through the FAWCO grant, we are training 75 more women and training also 45 more Peer Educators. We also developed a center of expertise where we are training girls in the Safe Spaces program as Peer Educators to learn these farming skills in the city. Then they would be the ones teaching other women from other urban centers who are interested in starting urban farms in the city.
We need to have food in the cities and, because hydroponics does not require a lot of space or water and produces a lot of food within a very short time, this can be adopted in the urban cities. We see that people will live a better life in the city because there are no rivers around and, when they sprinkle clean water, they can produce their own food and make money to educate their children.
Safe Spaces created a bit of harmony. Domestic violence decreased because the woman could bring something to the table. So, we were cutting across almost all of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) using the hydroponics system urban farm model because it helped with the reduction of domestic violence. I talk about gender partnership instead of equality because equality brings a lot of issues for people in the community. They say a woman cannot be equal to a man but, if I say that it is a partnership where men and women work together to make ends meet, then the community will accept it. We are complementing each other – so you just make it look nicer for people.
That’s how Awesome Blossoms was created. Now we are working with the 72 women who started the pilot farms. Also, we have the peer educators who are trained on the pilot farms and went through train-the-trainers training. These community women from the pilot and the Peer Educators coach the new 75 women in the three new farms.
It sounds like you’re not trying to have equality but are, instead, shifting
attitudes, so the blossoms are part of the society. Are the schools public or
private? Are they Catholic schools or are they public schools?
It’s public schools in the urban areas where there is the space to create the farms. We work with the schools in the cities who have spaces in schools that are not being utilized. They always have some spaces that they don’t use so we are getting into contracts with the schools for spaces that they’re not using. They leverage that by also sharing some of our farm gardens so they can support the school and teach their kids to grow their own food. They also learn a new technique, hydroponics, that can be adopted to grow food in the future.
For the women who are trained, are they parents of the kids at that school?
No, they’re parents in the Safe Spaces program. But we do reach the parents of the kids in those schools through our community outreach in other programs. Awesome Blossoms is one of our social enterprises, so we have a CBO (community-based organization) for the 2,000 girls and then we have our social enterprises, which includes Awesome Blossoms.
Also, we have a tailoring shop and we have a water project coming up. These are income-generating sustainability projects within Safe Spaces.
In our CBO (community-based organization), we have programs in the community for the girls on reproductive health and life skills, and arts and sports. Now we have vocational training and social enterprises with the idea of helping young women become financially independent to support their families. We focus more on supporting the girls because those programs are the ones that are going to be the most helpful in the future.
About the hydroponic gardens: you say that it only takes 45 days to grow vegetables. Does that mean you can have more harvests per year?
Yes, it depends on the vegetables you grow. Spinach grows very fast in 45 days. We are not using soil (in hydroponic farming) so it’s not prone to soil-based pests. We use minerals and pumice and, you know, it’s organic.
Do you have to buy those then?
Yes. We partner with Hydroponics Africa which is a company that taught us how to do the farming in urban cities—although they do theirs in rural settings. But they’re the ones who taught us to do that in our specific urban setting.
Can you talk more and identify others who helped you along the way? Who were your mentors and supporters and how did you reach out to them?
On a personal level, I would say the priest helped me to find the path because we didn’t have any other role models in the community. I became the first mentor for the girls and for the slums on the personal level. For the Safe Spaces programs, I work with other networks, we network with other organizations. I have personal friends so, as I worked in the community, there were also other programs that were not related to Safe Spaces but were in the community, especially boys’ and girls’ programs.
When we started Safe Spaces, it was word of mouth. When people came to visit other programs, they would pass by, even people from Canada and Amsterdam. I developed a network of friends and supporters all over the world. The first of my supporters were from Canada—Schools Without Borders. They’re the ones who started supporting the Safe Spaces programs. Then, later, came women and men from Amsterdam. I got a network of other women in Amsterdam and formed friends of Safe Spaces and later formed the Safe Spaces Foundation in the Netherlands to collect money from well-wishers to support our programs in Nairobi. On the way, local organizations like Hydroponics Africa, Box Girls, UNICEF, and many other organizations. They helped me build that support to grow a specific program just for the girls and women.
Did you get support from the government or from governmental institutions in Nairobi at all or was it more like the international support kind of motivated people in the government institutions in Nairobi?
I always don’t want to talk much about governmental involvement in program activities because sometimes it’s more minimal. Sometimes they have their own way of running their programs on the ground based on their policies. We don’t get any funding from the government although we are supposed to. We do get village elders involved in our work at the lowest level. The chief in the community area and county members—people of the lower class of government. They provide moral support but not actually funding the programs.
Does international support neutralize the conflict?
Yeah, we also like working grassroots, which is a better way of reaching many people and in their areas of need. We know the issues that are facing them daily that not many people see every day.
Can you talk about some of the challenges that you encountered along the way in developing these?
One of the challenges of empowering the girls and women is that you create conflicts between a man and a woman. Because this woman is empowered, she’s powerful, she implements things, she’s a workaholic. So, you can imagine if she is empowered how many things she’s going to do that the man does not do and that the man feels intimidated and insecure a bit. That was one challenge—I had to get the man to let the girl be educated, to let the woman get out and do some business so women and men could support each other. So that was a big conflict.
Teaching reproductive health to young girls was a big challenge because they all also had mentalities, like my father. When these girls reach a certain age, they are supposed to get married. You get money to educate the boy. He is going to marry and bring the girl home. The girl is going to be married and go away. So, shifting changes in thinking, that the girl could be the one supporting their home as opposed to the boy. When they get information, when they become skilled, when they become professionals, they’re going to come back and support the family more.
I had to give examples that men could understand. So, I said: “What happens when you’re selling the girl to another person?” An example that I used most of the time was to ask the men: “How much would an uneducated girl cost, two cows or even one cow? What about if your daughter was a doctor or a lawyer or an architect? How many cows would you ask for?” Everybody said, like fifty cows and I’m like “What would you rather have, one cow or fifty cows?” They would say “fifty cows.” And then I said: “You’re gonna let me take your girls to school.” They agreed. I had to use this example so that men can change. It’s just stepping towards something else to shift away from the traditional attitudes of parents in order to support girls getting an education. I had to have a lot of one-on-one talks with the fathers and with the mothers, to take reproductive health training to their homes and create partnerships and safe spaces for the girl. They learn about peer pressure and high rates of pregnancy. The girls can go home with high self-esteem.
You see, these parents don’t have that high self-esteem and there’s a conflict, so you also must prepare them to grow. One-on-one talks are one of the challenges. I had another challenge; I had to get the women to understand that they have potential to change their community, to make decisions, and to be productive members of their communities. They were like “oh, you know, my husband is going to send me away. I can’t do that.” I will say: “Hey, come on! If you get money, and you can help your husband when he comes home when he didn’t get any money and you did your business and you got 200 shillings and you bought food, do you think he will refuse to eat? Because you did business, he’s going to eat and he’s going to be happy—all of you are going to be happy.” The women then say: “Oh yes, I think I need to help him.”
Slowly there was this shift in the community towards women’s empowerment. There are people who come from rural areas who still have the same mentality and we still must continue to do community outreach.
Another challenge I had was about girls’ empowerment; people ask “why not boys, why are you educating only the girls?” I say it’s because the girls are the ones who get pregnant. When they get pregnant it’s nine months for the pregnancy and another nine months to take care of the baby. There’s two years wasted for the girls (as opposed to the boys). I always told them they’re giving the boys a false sense of self-esteem because they had self-esteem that was so patriarchal. They need to sit down with their sisters who do the cooking. I tell the men: “You don’t do women’s work but, at the end of the day, why should she clean the plate that you have eaten on? Why should she wash your underwear? You need to take care of your sister.” So, we had to tell them that the girls need more empowerment because of the patriarchy—to shift the community’s thinking so that they can grow up and start working together with the men. The girls shouldn’t feel abandoned: They are taking care of ten people by themselves. That’s so harsh. But if the woman is also working, both parents can take care of the ten kids together. That was something I had to tell them—that the girls need more empowerment because they’re more vulnerable than the boys.
Another challenge was funding to run the programs. I knew all the problems inside out that other people would never notice. Not everybody will understand this life because they’ve never lived this life. It’s only me who understood what was happening down there so getting funding to run all the programs was also a challenge. But, with time, I got like-minded people to fund a specific program like a basketball scholarship or reproductive health. I want to support education and, slowly, I started pooling resources together. We have enough to run the program and we are still looking for funding because the program has really expanded. My goal is to have a community center you know for Safe Spaces, maybe in ten to fifteen years, and have all these programs run out of one place. Right now, we work in a rented office, so we pay rent, and we pay bills at the end of the month. The girls come to the program on weekends and holidays and every day we send our peer educators to schools because we cannot host all of them in the Safe Spaces office. We still must work to get more people coming and getting involved.
It was interesting you mentioned that in the patriarchal society, it’s not only the women who suffer—it’s also the men because they develop a false sense of self-esteem. But what happens if you get sick? Who will run the programs?
I have a support system and I have girls who have been in Safe Spaces since we started the program, and our motto is “I’m the change” because you are the one who really makes a difference in your life before you can make a difference for the others. Girls have become skilled trainers, and they support the younger girls. I work with girls from five years old to twenty-five years and we have a reproductive health curriculum that works with different age groups, one for five-to-ten-year-olds and one for eleven-to-sixteen-year-olds and above. The reason I choose the younger group from five years is because they witness their parents’ sexual activities. The house is so small, and it’s all partitioned by cardboard. The kids think that having sex at an early stage is just normal because they see it happening in their house. So, if you want to change their way of thinking, you must educate them at five years old, when they’ve started noticing what is happening, and tell them that the activity is for older people. We have enough trainers to be able to cover like training for all the girls. Everyone who has gone through the Safe Spaces program has to make sure that they can teach one other person.
As an aside, do you still talk to yourself?
I hold a general meeting with myself. I’ve been talking to myself for a long time. I think it’s very beneficial because you get expert advice! You must check yourself because you are the expert in your life.
How can those outside of your community—even those in the Global North—support your work? I guess you touched on that a little bit by talking about your supporters already, but did you want to elaborate on that a bit more, or add anything to that, or summarize?
I would say the support I need is a piece of your mind, skills. We have volunteers who can come and share their expertise in life skills in computer literacy, in photography, and in reproductive health. We need your hand to hold me and fundraising to support the programs running on the ground; and a piece of your heart just to support the work that we do.
I would really love to get your support to build the community center for Safe Spaces in the future. That’s my big dream.
But do you have the space for it in the community?
We will get land somewhere to build the community center if we have a prospect of gaining monetary support to build it. We already have a sketch of what our community center would look like.
Was that just you or was that multiple people?
Actually, it was multiple people, my friends and my supporters. It was derived from all the programs in the community sector. We would like an internet cafe, an auto mechanics garage, a library, an office, and a basketball court.
So, the people you’ve trained in hydroponics could go outside the community and train other people to grow food?
Yes, even in the smallest spaces, they just need to do the circular and vertical gardens. Leslie has been our angel in all of this.
Do you have any final remarks?
We all need to understand the value of giving girls opportunities. Otherwise, if we don’t do that, then the patriarchy is still going to kill our women. We are denied opportunities when we can really make the change that is needed in the world.
But then you don’t teach the girls self-defense because then they become a target. Is that right?
Yes, because they become a target by men and they’ll be hurt. But, we do teach basketball, so they know more about how to use their bodies, but that’s not self-defense. It’s walking a fine line that’s also a life skill.
Additional Information:
https://www.fawco.org/global-issues/target-program/environment-2022-2025/target-project-2023-2025
https://www.fawcofoundation.org/programs/target-project-2022-2025-environment
