This is Marima.
Behind every statistical insight is a mother whose life was rewritten.
Marima
Narok County, Kenya
Marima was married off at the age of 12. She never attended school. She became the fourth wife of a man the age of her father. She endured 17 years of abuse, violence and hardship before making the decision to leave.
She returned home to live with her 90-year-old mother. Her children and mother depended on her. But the woman who came home was not the same woman who had left.
Marima once shared with us that there were mornings she never wanted to wake up. When she did, she often woke up with a terrible headache.
Some days her children would leave for school in the morning and come home in the evening to find her sitting in the same place. She would begin preparing a meal and later realise she had put salt in the tea instead of tea leaves. Other times the food would burn because she had forgotten she was cooking.
Women from nearby farms kept inviting her to come and work with them. She kept saying no. Not because she didn't need the work — she told us she believed they could never understand who they were inviting.
If you had walked past Marima sitting outside her mother's home, you might never have known what she was passing through. We know because one day, after she finally found her voice, she told us.
