Searching to Bring the Lessons Home
By Amy Argetsinger
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 31, 2003; Page A01
It had been more than four years since she persuaded the people of Enoosaen to send her to college in the United States -- to support, for once, those grand ambitions in a girl. She had made many promises in exchange for their endorsement and had half assumed that she'd be ready to return by now to start delivering on them. That she would be trying to open a school for girls. Or a clinic. Or helping those women sitting around her mother's table start their own businesses.
But for now she was not doing any of those things. She was getting ready for her senior year at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg. Her education had made her realize just how big the world was. How vast the needs. And how much more she had to learn before she could really make a difference in a Kenyan village with no running water, with no paved roads. She would have to get a master's degree.
And then a doctorate.
Or perhaps a law degree, which would mean several more years in America before she could try to make good on her promises.
Earlier in the summer, Ntaiya had received news that fed her guilt over leaving home. Her 20-year-old sister Naserian was getting married -- throwing away the education their mother had labored to provide and rushing into the kind of careless young union that Ntaiya felt had doomed so many of their childhood friends to poverty.
"If I were there," she said bitterly, "I could stop this marriage."
But she was not there. And so there were things she simply could not do, and things she could not see. Like how a few homes now had electricity. And how the policies of Kenya's new president had filled the village school with children. And how, among even some of the people closest to her, attitudes about women and education were fast evolving.
Her home was changing, without her. Just as she was changing without her home.
About This Series
These articles are based on interviews with and observations of Kakenya Ntaiya (pronounced kah-KEHN-yah n-ta-YAH) that began in spring 2001, the year after she arrived in Lynchburg, Va., to attend Randolph-Macon Woman's College. In August, staff writer Amy Argetsinger and staff photographer Jahi Chikwendiu spent a week with Ntaiya's family, neighbors and teachers in Enoosaen (pronounced eh-noh-sah-YEHN), Kenya. Swahili and Maa translators assisted with some interviews there. Other sources were Ntaiya's classmates, professors and college officials in Virginia.
More From Series
