“When I was about nine years old, my father married me off to an old man who was 78 years old,” Younis explains, the memories of her harrowing experience still raw. “I went to his home and I stayed with him one week.

“He told me that I will be a wife but I was just innocent, I wanted to come to school. But that man wanted me to be a third wife. I told him, I will not be your wife, and he caned me.

“Then I heard that there is a woman who helps children. I came from Baragoi barefoot, I didn’t even have shoes that day. I came to Maralal … Kulea took me to [the] children’s office, she rescued me.”

There are eight other girls at Younis’s boarding school just like her; all have been brought to safety by Josephine Kulea and her Samburu Girls Foundation.

To these girls, and some 200 others across Kenya, Kulea is “Mama Kulea.” When their families refuse to have anything more to do with them, she takes the place of their mothers.

Kulea is fighting against the very Samburu cultural traditions she grew up with. She says she began asking questions about what was happening in her community after attending boarding school and studying for a nursing degree in a different part of the country.

“I realized we are the only ones doing FGM, female genital mutilation, the other communities [are] not doing it,” she explains. “I … came to realize that there are things that are not right and I need to make a difference, that’s how I started rescuing girls.”

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