Lydia was engaged at the age of four. Her father, a Masai warrior, accepted several cattle as a dowry and promised to deliver his daughter in marriage to a man of much prestige. After Lydia’s initiation into adulthood through a traditional circumcision ceremony, she would become the man’s sixth wife.
When she was seven, Lydia learned what that meant. She watched her older sister undergo the circumcision ritual with a small group of village girls reaching puberty. She saw the blood. She heard the screams. And seven-year-old Lydia determined the Masai life was not for her. Alone, she sneaked off into the Kenyan countryside.
She marched toward freedom—but at a price. She forsook her family, her home, her culture. She left her family disgraced. She saw no other way to escape her prescribed fate.
Today, twenty-two years later, Lydia Nkurruna, now twenty-eight, lives in suburban Minneapolis, but still fears Kenya. She tells her story seated in the office of her attorney, a short walk from the Mall of America. She wears a white sweatshirt that glitters Nike across the front. She crosses her legs, clad in blue jeans. Her smooth skin shines the color of a roasted coffee bean. “If I had not left, I’d be in the bushes now with some kids, uneducated,” she says.
It’s hard to imagine this woman with the black hair woven into skinny braids stretching halfway down her back having her head shaved, wearing a traditional wrap, living in a dung hut, raising six or seven children. That life seems so remote from this office—the laptop perched before her, the red cell phone she slips from her purse—but that would be her life today if she were to return to her native Kenya. She fears her family would hunt her down, force her to be circumcised, to accept her arranged marriage. That is, if they didn’t kill her.
Lydia was born in the Rift Valley, between Lake Victoria and Nairobi. Her family lived with other extended families in a cluster of flat-topped dung huts that housed about 100 people, one of many Masai communities scattered across the valley. Lydia shared a hut with her father, mother, two brothers and an older sister, Lucy. From the age of her betrothal, she wore a flat, beaded necklace—a sign of her engagement.
The Masai of Kenya and northern Tanzania, a population estimated at around 750,000, are one of the world’s oldest surviving cultures. They are a seminomadic people, dependent on their cattle, which provide sustenance and shelter. The Masai have survived in a closed system where community elders pass along the customs and roles prescribed to each gender and generation. Boys are circumcised between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two in a ceremony that marks them as men. An uncircumcised male is not allowed to marry. The elder women instruct the girls in a long series of socialization practices that culminates in the female circumcision ceremony at puberty—a centuries-old practice. Fidelity to the traditional customs is the Masai culture’s lifeblood.
Girls are circumcised to discourage intercourse before marriage, to excise a “hard” part, i.e., the clitoris, associated with masculinity, and to identify those strong enough to preserve the culture. “It is supposed to be an ordeal to separate those who can carry on with the difficult life and raise the next generation,” says Asha Samad, a professor of African and women’s studies, anthropology, and human rights at City University of New York. “Only the toughest will be able to survive.”
Young girls are betrothed to older men who have completed their initiation into manhood. In the patriarchal society, the father of a girl accepts, sometimes even before his daughter is born, a dowry of a certain number of cattle, the culture’s currency, from a desirable suitor. The father pledges to deliver his daughter in marriage as a virgin. Since the vast majority of Masai do not read or write, a man’s word is paramount—he must keep it not only to maintain his honor, but to preserve the society.
A daughter does as her father directs. “She has been socialized all along to be a good Masai wife and mother, which means first of all to be obedient to your father and other elder men,” Samad says. Adolescent rebellion, particularly in the form of bucking cultural traditions, is not an option. Good girls accept their circumcisions and arranged marriages. “That’s nothing you can discuss with your parents,” Lydia says, her voice soft but firm. “You can know in your heart you don’t want to do it, but you can’t say it because you will be beaten even until death.”
Some 130 million girls and women worldwide—most of them from Africa or Asia—have suffered female genital mutilation, according to NGO Equality Now. FGM refers to a variety of procedures that ranges in severity from cutting the hood of the clitoris to full circumcision or infibulation, which involves removing all of the external genitalia (clitoris, labia minora, and labia majora) and stitching the vaginal opening, leaving only a small space for the flow of urine and menstrual blood.
The Masai practice full circumcision on girls with very few exceptions. In rural areas such as the Rift Valley, an elder woman performs the procedure with a knife and no anesthesia. Sometimes, girls die from infection or excessive bleeding. Long-term, the procedure can cause chronic infections of the bladder and vagina, extremely painful menstruation, excessive scar tissue, formation of cysts on the stitch line, risk of HIV infection, and difficulties during childbirth. A leading cause of death among Masai women is blood loss during childbirth due to scar tissue resulting from FGM.
The Kenyan government passed legislation in 2001 that outlawed FGM in girls under the age of eighteen, but the law has been widely unenforced and ignored. It has not abated the practice, particularly in rural areas. The results of a 2005 survey reported by Integrated Regional Information Networks, the United Nations’ information service, found that 100 percent of Masai girls over fifteen years of age had undergone FGM. “I doubt the Children’s Act has affected the number circumcised in rural areas,” Samad says.
Federal law prohibits female genital mutilation in the United States. In November in Atlanta, an Ethiopian immigrant became the first person convicted under the law for circumcising his two-year-old daughter. In Minnesota, a statute banning the practice was enacted in 1994 after a young immigrant girl was treated at a Twin Cities hospital for severe bleeding after circumcision.
There remain whispers and rumors that female genital mutilation is taking place in Minnesota’s African immigrant community—about 95 percent of girls are circumcised in Somalia—but the Minnesota Department of Health and local hospitals have no firm evidence of the practice. A spokesperson for Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota says that it’s possible that girls are being circumcised, but pediatricians are not seeing signs of it: A child’s genitals are not examined in routine visits. “I think it’s kind of an underground thing, because it’s illegal,” says Brooke Mengel, a paralegal at the Breitman law firm who worked on Lydia ’s case.
One August day in 1985, not long after Lydia had watched her sister and the other girls suffer their circumcisions, she walked away from the dung huts. “You walk like you’re going to get some firewood, but you just walk and walk and walk,” she says in her clipped accent. She did not say goodbye to her family. She carried no food. She wore only her togalike dress and the leather sandals on her feet. She did not know where she would end up. She only knew that if she did not leave, she would bleed and scream like her sister.
Lydia walked toward the river more than a mile away.
She woke up in the Narok District Hospital, sixty miles east of Nairobi. She had nearly drowned in her attempt to cross the river. A nurse explained to Lydia that she had been found unconscious on the shore. Lydia begged not to be sent back home. She had heard Catholic missionaries who passed through her village speak about the importance of education. She wanted to go to school.
The nurse, who was not Masai, but was familiar with the culture, put Lydia in the care of the Tasaru Girls’ Rescue Centre, an organization that works with young Masai girls fleeing from FGM and forced marriage. The Tasaru workers arranged for Lydia to attend St. Mary’s, a Catholic boarding school in Narok. During her weeklong stay at the hospital, Lydia trashed the engagement necklace that she had worn for three years.
Lydia stayed at St. Mary’s over school breaks, afraid that if she returned home, she would never be able to leave again. When she was in sixth grade, the men from her family discovered where she was and arrived at the school. The head mistress intercepted them. Lydia hid as her father demanded that she return home to fulfill her marriage obligation. He left without Lydia, only after the head mistress, bluffing, assured him Lydia would return when she completed her studies.
The man who had given cattle as a dowry pressured Lydia’s father to fulfill his part of the bargain. He wanted the wife promised to him. Lydia ’s father had no other daughter to offer in her place—his oldest was already married. He had no way to save face other than to retrieve Lydia. When she decided to continue her studies at St. Terige High in Lessos, his patience was at a breaking point. Again, he traveled to bring her home. Once again, she hid. This time, a teacher turned away Lydia’s father.
Lydia’s departure had damaged her family’s honor; her disobedience had humiliated her father. Worse, it had caused him to break his word, an egregious breach of the Masai cultural foundation. “He was angry that I had betrayed my family and Masai custom,” says Lydia. Nevertheless, she stayed at the high school and graduated in 1996. After graduation, she moved into the apartment of an older woman who had befriended her. She did not let her family know where she was. Knowing how unusual it was for a Masai woman to live in a non–Masai household outside of a Masai community, she feared that other Masai would recognize her by her Masai name or physical features. “The Masai are a clan that works together, so I was afraid if I came to know anyone that word would get back to my family about where I was staying and they would come to take me back to my village by force,” she says. “I felt like a prisoner.”
In 2000, she enrolled in Utalii College in Nairobi to study the hospitality industry. Very few Kenyan women attend college; it is almost unheard of for a Masai woman to do so. Other students teased or ridiculed her, saying, “What are you doing here?”
After a year in Nairobi, she was accepted for a tourism internship program at the American Hospitality Academy on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. When she boarded the plane in Kenya, she planned not to return. She would find work after finishing her internship and stay in the United States. Her escape would finally be complete.
Things didn’t work out so neatly. Lydia arrived the week before 9/11. The hotel business suffered such a drop-off that the school could not afford to house Lydia and the other international students. The school told them to go home.
During her brief internship, Lydia had met Richard Nyabworo, a man three years older than she, on a sightseeing trip to Savannah, Georgia, with a group of fellow students. Nyabworo, also there on vacation, spotted her Kenya T-shirt and struck up a conversation. Though he was from Kenya, he was not Masai. He took her in when the school dismissed its international students. Their friendship eventually turned romantic.
Lydia was determined to continue her studies and find work. She tried to enroll in a Texas college to major in nursing, but she learned she would have to return to Kenya to change her visa to be accepted at the college. She didn’t dare. Instead, she moved to Dallas and worked as a nursing aide at a nursing home.
Nyabworo moved to Minnesota in late 2002, and Lydia moved there too. She again found work as a nursing aide, this time at a nursing home in St. Louis Park. When her student visa expired in 2003, she obtained a work permit. She also completed her associate degree in culinary arts at Hennepin Technical College.
The threat of being sent back to Kenya—and the fate that awaited—stalked her. After much research into student visas, she learned about asylum protection. With the help of Richard Breitman, a Bloomington– based immigration attorney, she applied for asylum in April 2004. A month later, her application was denied because she had not met the requirement of applying within a year of entering the country. No one had told her about such a requirement during her first year in the United States. “I did not tell anyone about how I was afraid to return to Kenya because I did not know anyone well enough to trust them with that personal information,” she says.
Lydia was referred to a judge from the U.S. Department of Justice, who would consider her case. To win “withholding of removal” status, an applicant must convince the judge that if she returns to her home country, she would most likely face persecution because of her race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. In her application, Lydia asserted her fear that if she were to go back to Kenya, the Masai would return her to her community, which would force her to undergo FGM, which can lead to death.
Reports from human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Equality Now, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights corroborated the danger Lydia feared. “It is undoubtedly true that this applicant will face great danger, tortuous experiences, and a threat to her very life if she is forced to return to Kenya,” Samad swore in support of Lydia’s claim.
Had she applied for asylum her first year in the country and been granted it, Lydia would have been able to receive a green card, which could lead to U.S. citizenship in five years. Now, if she were to convince the judge—and earn withholding of removal status—she would be able to stay in the United States and work with a permit, but it would have to be renewed annually and she would not be readmitted if she traveled outside the country. If the judge did not grant withholding status, Lydia would be allowed to depart voluntarily, but could not reenter the country for ten years. Worst case, she would be detained and deported to Kenya.
Lydia waited more than two years for the government’s ruling on her status. After both sides submitted materials in support of their claims, the judge heard final testimony in February 2006. The court scheduled a follow-up meeting for April 13, when Lydia expected the judge to rule on her status. The meeting was postponed until June 9. And again to September 7.
Lydia continued to work her jobs as an aide at two nursing homes and as a line cook at the Marriott Hotel, each day wondering if she would be there the next month and still too afraid to talk to any of her co-workers about her situation. The waiting frustrated her. The uncertainty scared her. She tried to be patient, to hope for the best. But she knew that her fate was once again out of her hands.
Finally, on September 18, 2006, Lydia appeared before the judge for his decision. Breitman sat on one side, paralegal Mengel sat on the other. Lydia waited tensely.
The judge began to read his decision in language archaic and remote. No one was allowed to speak. Mengel smiled at Lydia. She gave the paralegal a questioning look. Mengel smiled more—good news! Lydia smiled and did a quiet dance with her hands and shoulders. She thanked God in her heart. Finally, she was safe from the Masai.
Safe, but isolated. To secure her safety, Lydia had been forced to sever ties with her community. She has not spoken to her family since that August day twenty-two years earlier when she walked away. They do not read, so no letters were sent. She knows she will probably never see her family again—but would like to. She wishes she could make peace with them. “I’d love to,” she says. She shrugs. “I don’t know.” Tears swim in her eyes. She covers her face with her hand.
Seven-year-old Lydia took a path less traveled, but the reality of that route’s impact resounds with a thud throughout her days in the United States. She works. She watches CNN and Dr. Phil. She bakes, trying new recipes or making her favorite lemon cake. The weight of her new life is forever with her. She wants to believe it is for the better. “So long as I’m happy and a free woman, that’s all that matters to me right now,” she says. “There are some people who would die for the opportunities I have. I’m satisfied with what I’ve got.”
Lydia loves Nyabworo, who has permanent resident status, and figures they will marry, perhaps within the next year. She wants to have children. Eventually. In the meantime, she is working toward a nursing degree at Hennepin Technical College and dreams of being able to do for the less fortunate what others have done for her. “I want to help others, the way I’ve been helped by other people,” she says.
What if the girls of her Masai community she played with as a child could see her today? “They would envy me,” she says. “I know that, because in their heart, it [a Masai woman’s life] is not something they really want. At such a tender age to go through all that, it’s not right for them. They should be given a choice. Some of them might be doctors, teachers, ambassadors—who knows?—if they were given the opportunities.”
© John Rosengren