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| Sanburu Girls Foundation |
There's
little outward clue to the trauma she's already been through in her 13
short years. When she was just nine years old, Younis's parents arranged
for her to marry a man old enough to be her grandfather, in accordance
with local Samburu tradition.
The
Samburu are an ancient Kenyan tribe pastoralist cattle herders, said to
be "distant cousins" of the Maasai. Even to outsiders, their languages
and customs are strikingly similar.
Younis
and other girls like her have dared to break away from some of these
traditions -- child marriage, female genital mutilation and beading (the
practice of promising girls to their male relatives for sex) --which
are illegal in Kenya.
But in doing so they risk being disowned by their families and communities.
"When
I was about nine years old, my father married me off to an old man who
was 78 years old," Younis explains, the memories of her harrowing
experience still raw. "I went to his home and I stayed with him one
week.
"He told me that I will be a
wife but I was just innocent, I wanted to come to school. But that man
wanted me to be a third wife. I told him, I will not be your wife, and
he caned me.
"Then I heard that there is a woman who
helps children. I came from Baragoi barefoot, I didn't even have shoes
that day. I came to Maralal ... Kulea took me to [the] children's
office, she rescued me."
There are
eight other girls at Younis's boarding school just like her; all have
been brought to safety by Josephine Kulea and her Samburu Girls Foundation.
To
these girls, and some 200 others across Kenya, Kulea is "Mama Kulea."
When their families refuse to have anything more to do with them, she
takes the place of their mothers.
Kulea
is fighting against the very Samburu cultural traditions she grew up
with. She says she began asking questions about what was happening in
her community after attending boarding school and studying for a nursing
degree in a different part of the country.
"I
realized we are the only ones doing FGM, female genital mutilation, the
other communities [are] not doing it," she explains. "I ... came to
realize that there are things that are not right and I need to make a
difference, that's how I started rescuing girls."
And she began, in 2011, by looking very close to home.
"My
first rescue was my two cousins," she explains. "One was 10 years old
and she was the one getting married; most of the time in my community,
when the girl is getting married young, that is when they undergo female
circumcision. I was alerted that she was going to get married, so I
went and rescued her, and after I rescued her I took her to school.
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