While I was in high school, something happened. I...

While I was in high school, something happened. I met a young gentleman from our village who had been to the University of Oregon…

I told him, “Well, I want to go to where you [went]”… And he told me, “What do you mean you want to go? Don’t you have a husband waiting for you?” And I told him, “Don’t worry about that part. Just tell me how to get there.”

…I applied to school and I was accepted to [Randolph College] in Lynchburg, Virginia. [But] I couldn’t come without the support of the village because I needed to raise money … and again, when the men heard and the people heard that a woman had gotten an opportunity to go to school, they said, “What a lost opportunity. This should have been given to a boy.”

From Kakenya Ntaiya’s TEDxMidAtlantic talk, “The first school for Massi girls,” about her fight to attend school as a Massi woman, and how she came to found the first girls’ school in her village in Kenya