Themes from the Interviews - July 20-26, 2009

During my time at Ombogo, I was able to interview 20 young women about their experiences growing up in Kenya. These girls came from vary different circumstances. Some of the young women were from very rural parts of Western Kenya and were, perhaps, the first young women in their communities to go to high school. Some came from urban Nairobi and had grown up with significant Western influence. Some were orphans, left without family to support them because of the AIDS pandemic, sponsored by the Slum Doctor Programme for their school fees. Others were full-paying students whose families chose to send them to Ombogo because of the academic reputation and the safety of the school.

I won't summarize all the themes that emerged from these interviews here, but there are a couple of threads that might be interesting.

Gender roles - Gender roles were clearly differentiated, particularly in the rural areas. Boys tend the cattle, sheep and goats and girls care for the children and participate in the household tasks of cooking, doing laundry at the river and cleaning the household. Garden care and fetching water seemed to be shared tasks.

Games were often gendered as well. Some of the girls reported that they would not be allowed to play football (soccer) in their villages, although they do play football at school. Both boys and girls play hide and seek and a version of dodge ball, played with cloth or paper wadded into a ball.

Sibling care and multi-generational homes. Girls from the rural areas seem to have been raised in multi-generational homes/compounds, while those from the urban areas were more likely to have been raised in a two parent/children household. The responsibility for caring for younger children, however, seemed to fall to the young girls in both settings. Some of the girls, particularly those from more rural settings, reported that these responsibilities often kept them from attending school themselves.

Early marriage - The girls from the rural villages were quite clear that if they were not in school, it is likely that they would have been married by the time they were 14 or 15. In the rural areas, there is still a bride price - the groom needs to pay the girl's family a cow or some goats for her hand - so young girls are often married to significantly older men who can afford to pay. The girl has little or no say about who she marries. Also, in this part of rural Kenya, polygamy is still practiced, and many of these girls came from homes with multiple wives (first wife has more power and status than the second or small wife).

These martial practices, along with the practice of wife inheritance, has contributed to the spread of HIV/AIDS in this part of Kenya. Almost all the girls reported that someone in their family or social network had HIV/AIDS; most of the transmission seemed to be through heterosexual contact. A couple of the young women told moving stories about coming home from boarding school to find that a beloved uncle or brother had died from the disease. Some of the young women had lost one or both parents to AIDS.