Daughters as bookkeeping entries…
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
I’ve trained Kenyan youth to hold Crucial Inquiries. A Maasai community in Kenya invited us to address them at one of their monthly gatherings. During the conversation, when one of the men said he was too poor to send his daughter to school, we led an inquiry into his belief that he is poor enough to warrant selling his daughter into marriage. Turns out this one mzee (elder) owns 200 acres of land! It had never occurred to him that his land was a resource. The only resource he was accustomed to counting is livestock.
The main resource the community is trained to see during the dry season–when livestock is dying from lack of food and water–is their unmarried daughters. During this time, daughters occur as a possible bookkeeping entry! They can replace their lost livestock with their unmarried daughter’s dowry and get their “bank” balance reconciled. By having the mzee see that he has other resources–besides his unmarried daughters, he could see a possibility beyond selling his daughter. Once he saw his other resources, he could also see the possibility of sending his daughter to university as well as keeping his livestock alive during the dry season, so he would never again be tempted to sell another daughter.
As we led the mzee in this conversation, the entire community began to see their attachment to the belief that they are poor. Once they actually inquired into their resources, they started organizing their resources in ways that would allow their daughters to go to university. That day, 15 daughters were very happy having escaped forced marriage and Female Genital Mutilation. The fathers were delighted to realize that they are not, and have never been, poor.
Context is decisive. Change the context and behavior changes accordingly.