Josephine Kulea

“Every day they walked in the health facility, they were very young girls carrying babies, and I would think they are their sisters but they were their children. Sometimes they would invite me to their weddings yet they are young girls. Anytime I saw the young girls I knew they were at risk. Sometimes I would ambush their weddings and rescue them.”

“My cousin was getting married. She was only 10 years old. I rescued her from the marriage on the day of her wedding. I was with her so I didn’t care even if the wedding ceremony went on. However, I was shocked that her younger sister who was seven years was married in her place”

“Even the elites… I get insulted on Facebook, I get insulted everywhere even on Twitter. They create something and say that Josephine is portraying our culture negatively. But they don’t realise these are kids in trouble and whose rights are being violated”

“My life has always been in danger since the beginning. The first one was when old men from my village got together to curse me because I arrested my uncle. They had a big ceremony to curse me and they expected me to be dead in the next hour. But few days later, weeks later and years later I am not yet dead”

“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”

“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”

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

“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”

“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”

“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”

“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”

“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”

“If girls go to school, we can have so many breakthroughs for girls' success and we can also stop mostly these harmful cultural practices”

“When you educate a man, you educate an individual. When you educate a woman, you educate a nation.”

“You see, when a girl is beaded by a relative, he is allowed to have sex with her, but if the girl conceives, which happens most of the time as no form of contraception is used, the baby is unwanted and is seen as a curse. It brings shame to the family.”

“Both genders bear the brunt of conflict when men are out fighting the women are taking care of the family. When the men are out fighting and they get injured, its the women who will take care of them. When the men go fight and die in war, the women are left with the burden of the family. Women have a role in the peace process.”