My name is Mercy Karanja from Rural Kenya and now living and working in the USA: I set out to write my story to encourage and motivate other girls and boys that there is “no limit. However, as I set out to write my story, i realized i was writing about the voice in my head, that of my grandmother, my father and my mother. My grandmother was the “Rock” of our family. Born in 1890’s in Kenya Africa, she defiled a strong traditional culture that forced women into marriage after the death of a husband. My grandfather died about 1930s when my father was only four years old. My grandmother decided to forge a journey to settle her family in ancestral land across the country. This was unacceptable for women and more so single! but she did it against huge conflict. My parents had five daughters before a son came along, there was great pressure not to take them. My grandmother become our champion always asking when we will get to “Cambridge” while other girls were married off before they got eighteen years old. Today two of my six sisters are doctors, two in development on the global stage and other two are farmers and teacher. We are working on increasing literacy for girls in my community which has not changed much.
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