By Magdalene Mukami

NAIROBI, Kenya

Women and girls marked International Day of the Girl on Sunday by celebrating the work of a few brave women who have helped save thousands of Kenyan girls from forced marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM).

Across the northern plains of Samburu, where a pastoral cattle-herding lifestyle goes back millenia, women like Josephine Kulea have been fighting traditions that lead young girls into a life of pain and servitude.

She is credited with saving more than 1,000 girls undergoing FGM and is still fighting the practice.

Like the girls she saves, Josephine grew up in a typical Samburu village where young girls do not have the choice to go to school and are forced to undergo FGM as a rite of passage to womanhood.

“I was able to go to school though I always watched as my classmates dropped out of school to get married at the ages of nine to 11 years,” Kulea told Anadolu Agency.

“FGM is practiced in my community as a rite of passage to womanhood and accounts for 97 percent of Kenya’s FGM cases. This is why I decided to rescue young girls from early marriages and the cut and return them to school.”

Fourteen-year-old Mary (not her real name) was among six girls recently saved by Kulea. Her smiles and giggles hide a tortured past.

She has a red ribbon holding a forelock of hair, which is decorated with beads, but her smile soon wilts as she describes the ordeal she and her older sister faced for two years.

“I was eleven when we were woken up at around 6 a.m. by noises outside,” she said. “The previous day we had learned that my older sister was to be married to a 50-year-old man who had paid two cows as dowry.”

With her gaze fixed on the ground, Mary added: “We were bundled outside by my mother, where we met a large crowd of women… there was not a single man in sight. I knew what was coming.”

According to the Samburu culture, before a girl is married she has to be circumcised to become a woman.

“We were stripped naked, that is when I knew I was also being married off to someone… They poured very cold water on us to ease the pain of the process."

“Then I saw the old woman bend in to cut the private parts of my sister who was sitting legs apart."

Beading

With tears rolling down her face, Mary described the panicked scenes as her sister was cut.

“My sister let out a terrifying scream that made my flesh crawl. She was bleeding out of control. They tried to apply traditional herbs to the wound but this did not stop the bleeding, it was during that confusion that I made my escape to a relative.”

Mary later learned that her sister had died a few hours later. Her prospective husband took his two cows back.

The practicing of FGM is not the only tradition that young Samburu girls fear. There is also a tradition known as “beading” - the rape of girls as young as seven with the knowledge of their families and communities.

While foreign tourists snatch up the colorful beads, few are aware of their horrifying significance.

“What to a foreigner may seem to be a gift from Santa Claus traumatizes a Samburu girl because for a Samburu girl that means sex at a young age with an old man,” Kulea told Anadolu Agency.

Beaded girls are promised to men from their clan in exchange for bead necklaces before they are married to someone from outside the clan. The more beads she has around her neck, the greater the dowry.

Kulea trained as a nurse before returning to Samburu, when she started rescuing young girls and paying for their school fees out of her salary.

Three years later, she receives assistance from well-wishers around the world. She has received accolades from groups in Kenya and further afield and was recognized as Kenya’s UN Person of the Year in 2013.

She met U.S. President Barack Obama during his recent visit to Kenya.

Given sufficient funding, Kulea plans to double her efforts next year to invest more in girls’ education that she hopes will eventually stamp out outdated cultural practices.