Yieyio: Maasai Women Navigating Motherhood in a Changing World
A story of courage.
Naiswaku Ene Leto, pictured, is an Indigenous Maasai woman who grew up in the Rift Valley outside of Narok Town, Kenya. At the tender age of 15 she was forced to marry an older man; shortly after their wedding he began suffering from untreated mental illness, causing him to violently abuse his new young wife. He beat Naiswaku close to death, which led her father to break with custom and take her back into her childhood home.
From that day, Naiswaku struggled to navigate the world as a single Maasai woman while simultaneously adjusting to Narok Town's rapid expansion. Community living gave way to individual plots, and Naiswaku found herself with nothing to call her own. This book is the journey of a Maasai woman who went from having only one cow and no house to decades later controlling livestock across 50 acres of land and building the house of her dreams.
Kristin Hedges
Dr. Kristin Hedges is associate professor of anthropology at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. Her primary research focuses on community-based approaches to understand health and the local cultural construction of health, illness, and risk. She was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kenya in 2000-2003, working on public health education programs, primarily HIV/AIDS awareness, where she met Naiswaku.