Global Health Leaders Rally in Bogotá to Tackle Reproductive Health Gaps

Will Women Deliver deliver her wish for safety, dignity, and a future?

By Sarah Eunice

 Naserian( not her real name), a resilient Maasai woman, rises with the first light of dawn, undiscouraged by a myriad of challenges life has cast her way. As the village slowly awakens, she is already up, embracing the quiet calm of early morning to begin her daily chores. Her strength and determination shine through every task she undertakes, a testament to her unwavering spirit and deep connection to her heritage. This is the story of a woman who faces hardship head-on, finding hope and purpose in each new day.

 In a week, thousands of miles away, global leaders will gather at the Women Deliver conference in Melbourne, Australia. They will sit in air-conditioned halls using words like intersectionality, sexual and reproductive health rights, and systemic reform. Although Naserian has never heard these words, she has lived every syllable of them.

For Naserian, survival means circumnavigating early marriage, FGM, denied education, and unsafe healthcare. Her story is the reason the Women Deliver conference exists: to give a global platform to struggles that women have suffered in silence for too long.

Here in the sprawling landscape of Kajiado, where tradition is as rooted as the ancient acacia trees, she is a montage of resilience and sorrow. As she stokes the morning fire, the smoke stinging her eyes, she contemplates the four ramparts of her challenge: the body, the mind, the home, and the womb.

During her youth, at 15 years, Naserian loved the taste of fresh rain on grass. It was during that time that the women of the village came to initiate her to womanhood. As culture dictates, the cut is a ticket to marriage and a price of purity. The traditional circumciser held her down on a stone and "cut"—Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)—her. The process that's always brutal and final.

According to Naserian, that was the most devastating moment for her. The pain was unbearable. “I cried until I had no more tears." She added that the older women told her to be silent since it's through pain that a girl becomes a woman.

Once the ritual was performed, she was immediately given in marriage. She was traded for twenty cows and ten goats to a man thrice her age. By fifteen, her body, still carrying the scars of the cut, she was forced to endure another excruciating pain: childbirth. The lack of access to healthcare in Magadi means the nearest dispensary is a two-hour walk across hyena territory. During her third delivery, she profusely bled but was treated with herbal concoctions by a traditional midwife.

She has been through it all. The loss of her three children, one to malaria and the other to malnutrition, devastated her, considering that accessing the nearest ambulance is a mirage.

Naserian looks at her daughters, Nayeku and Naipei, and feels a chilling cold through her spine, terror. She is aware that it is a matter of time before they are subjected to the same agony she went through: FGM. She sees a gloomy and blunt ceremonial knife in the hands of the elders and hears the promise of a dowry.

Gender discrimination here is a life sentence. While her sons were sent to the mobile school under the tree, her daughters stayed home as they awaited marriage and their further accumulation of wealth through bride price.

Although some people have seen light and are advocating for girl education, others are asking, why educate a cow that will graze in another man’s field?

The conference in Melbourne might speak of women in leadership and sustainable development goals. But in Oletepesi, Mary’s ambition dims slowly. She is a brilliant accountant of livestock and rations, but she has never signed her own name. Unfortunately, when the mobile money agents come, she must hand her phone to her husband, and without education, she is invisible, unable to vote, to object to land sales, or to stop her girls' forced betrothal.

For many, the home is supposed to be a sanctuary, but for Naserian, it is a negotiation with fear.

Domestic abuse is a norm like the evening milking. When the maize runs out, when the children cry, or when the neighbors’ goats stray into her crops, the rungu (club) comes out. Facing the full wrath of the husband. She hides the bruises with red ochre and beaded necklaces. She is afraid to report gender-based violence meted out against her since, “If I report to the chief,” she whispers, “they will say I am a disobedient woman.

Sexual harassment is not something she reports; it is something she survives. On the long walk to collect water, far from the village, the herders from the next manyatta watch her. Sometimes they follow. A middle-aged woman alone is considered “loose property.” She now carries a panga (machete) for the snakes. But she knows the two-legged snakes are more dangerous.

And then there is the dowry. Her brother in law died last year. According to custom, his younger brother, a man who drinks too much illicit brew, almost inherited her. She refused. In retaliation, her husband demanded a refund of the dowry cows from her father. Dowry-related crimes are not just about bride price here; they are about the constant threat of being returned like defective goods.

The most dangerous terrain Naserian navigates is the interior of her own body.

Two years ago, during a terrible drought, she was pregnant with her seventh child. She was starving, and the child was also starving. She knew that if she delivered, the baby would not survive, and neither would she. She made the desperate three-day journey to the backstreet of a town near the border.

The topic of reproductive health will be on top of the agenda at the Women Deliver conference. In Kajiado specifically and Kenya in general, it is a sin, a crime, and a secret. The procedure was done with dirty tools in the room was filled with the smell of mold and fear

 “I bled for a month,” Mary says, pulling her shuka tight. “I did not go to the hospital because the nurse is the pastor’s wife. I would have gone to jail. Or excommunicated from the church."

She survived the illegal abortion, but the infection that remained in her womb means she can no longer bear children. In a society where a woman’s value is measured by her fertility, Mary is now considered broken.

Soon, the delegates at Women Deliver will hold up placards reading” Change calls us here"; they will pass resolutions. They will fund NGOs.

Naserian will not be there. She will be walking 15 kilometres to fetch water. She will be bargaining with a shopkeeper who short changes her because she cannot count. She will be hiding her daughter from the circumciser who came from the neighboring town.

But there is a glimmer of hope. She hears the other Maasai women whispering about a new law and a safe house in Kajiado town.

“Maybe,” Naserian says, looking at the horizon where the dust meets the sky, “the loud voices in the big halls will reach the wind. Maybe the wind will carry it here.”

Until then, she remains what she has always been: the backbone of the savannah, bent but not broken, waiting for the world to finally see her not as a statistic but as a survivor.