My Maasai Life. Robin Wiszowaty
Table of Contents
Chapter 2 - Culture Shock in Nairobi Life
Chapter 6 - Chop Wood, Carry Water
Chapter 7 - Traditions in Change
Chapter 14 - Lives in the Balance
Notes and Background information
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
—Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, July 16, 1903
I feel tied to this life. Bound by decisions I never made, decided by people I have never met. Greeted with an outcome, beginning with an end, I am struggling to free myself of an upbringing I did not choose. Instead of looking at the world through the privileged eyes of an American, I want to broaden my vision and see life through a non-Western perspective. I want to discover for myself and break free from a worldview that I don’t believe. I want to be cut down, sliced up, bashed and thrown this way and that . . . then rebuild myself into a shape that I dictate on my own terms, incorporating new meanings into my world. Until then, I am living someone else’s decisions, thoughts and beliefs. I am ready to start living on my own.
—Journal entry, November 2001
Foreword
Dear Friends,
Today’s world faces many challenges and divides. Economic catastrophe, the threat of terrorism and longstanding military struggles—with an increasingly sensational media bringing it to us twenty-four hours a day in real-time—have made us fearful of an imagined “other.” While the information age has in many respects brought us closer together, it has in many ways cast us apart, forging cultural divisions rather than building communities.
We have globalized our technology and our economy. But we have yet to globalize our compassion.
That’s why Robin Wiszowaty is our hero. Her journey has allowed her to become a true bridge between worlds. By embarking on her overseas journey from suburban America to rural Kenya, reaching out into the unknown, she made an incredible leap of courage, one few of us would even consider.
Everyone knows that old adage, “You’ll never understand a man until you walk a mile in his shoes.” Robin’s own quest found her walking for miles barefoot alongside Maasai children as they headed off for school for the first time. She spent hours lugging water and firewood, brewing tea and gathering around a fire with families in their mud-hut homes, absorbing their customs and mastering their language.
In our frequent travels to rural Kenya, we’ve seen tourists and backpackers delight in the enthralling sights and sounds of this incredible land. But while they only briefly observe these scenes from afar, Robin wholly immersed herself in the true experience of life in Maasailand. And in return, the Maasai people accepted her as one of their own.
We’ve seen her sitting in hushed, intimate conversation with village elders, whose trust she earned through empathy and understanding. We’ve seen her astonish visiting students and volunteers with stories of her adventures. And we’ve seen her embraced by the teary-eyed mamas who are eternally grateful for her hard work in her role as Free The Children’s Kenya Program Director.
In reaching out, Robin also discovered something within herself: the power to rise above limits, to break free of the status quo and to bridge worlds in a way that makes a true difference in people’s lives.
Robin Wiszowaty is our hero. And by sharing her story, we know she’ll become yours too.
Craig and Marc Kielburger
Free The Children / Me to We
Prologue
I am squeezed with dozens of other bodies into the back of a rusted, white Toyota pickup truck, bouncing along a dirt road toward the market town of Soko. A