After visiting Rebecca a number of instances over the course of a 12 months, OTA interviewed her in September 2013 to share her story of Umoja Girls’s Group. She based Umoja in 1990 to assist Samburu girls affected by home violence and different abuses discover a protected refuge. Over the many years she has met unimaginable opposition from the Samburu males, however towards the percentages she has established a haven at the moment housing 58 girls and not too long ago ran for a political place in her neighborhood.
My title is Rebecca Lolosoli. I work with Umoja Girls’s Group which was began in 1990. We began a girls’s village and in 1990 we had three girls; now we’re 58 girls. It is a village the place girls run to, like a shelter for the ladies.
We’re preventing for the rights of girls, the rights of weak households, and the rights of women. Samburu girls haven’t got rights. So we combat for our ladies to go to highschool, to decide on their husbands and to personal something like land and livestock as every other human being can. This village is the shelter for ladies the place girls and ladies run to throughout their issues, reminiscent of early marriages, early being pregnant, and Feminine Genital Mutilation (FGM). We additionally attempt to assist these ladies that get pregnant earlier than FGM as a result of their child shall be killed so we attempt to shield the lady and shield the infant.
And now additionally the ladies work preventing for peace. We want peace in Kenya and we wish to have peace with different communities like our neighbours – those who’re preventing with Samburu: Borana, Turkana, and Pokor. So we predict the ladies are to convey these adjustments of peace and we wish to community with our neighbours (the Borana, Turkana and Pokor). We wish to go to one another and attempt to see how we are able to convey peace between us as a result of we’re the victims. It is at all times the ladies and kids who’re the victims. That is why we now have to suppose once more about peace as a result of there is no growth with out peace and that is what we try to do with Umoja Girls’s Group.
You’ll be able to go to Umoja Girls’s Village at Archer’s Put up, close to the gate of Samburu Nationwide Reserve. Rebecca additionally runs a campsite near the village the place vacationers visiting the Reserve can keep. The proceeds from the camp help the ladies within the village and their ongoing combat for ladies’s rights within the Samburu neighborhood. Go to www.umojawomen.internet for extra info.
