When I told a friend about a landmark case where two poor Kenyan women were suing the government for illegally detaining them in a maternity hospital for failing to pay their bills, he said, half in jest: ‘But they had nine months to save for it didn’t they?”

A fair point some might think.

But it also reveals the gaping chasm between the rich and the poor – not just economic, but in our ability to comprehend one another’s life experiences.

Take Margaret, one of the petitioners, who was first detained when she was 15-years-old and unable to pay for her Caesarean section.

The most poignant part of her story is not the abuse meted out to her by the medical staff or the fact that they accidentally left a pair of scissors in her womb.

It is her back story. How did she get there?

Margaret had been drugged, raped, held hostage and impregnated by a man that she still calls her ‘husband’.

Her father died when she was very young and her mother sent her, at the age of nine, to work as a househelp for a relative in Nairobi.

“That auntie really tortured me,” said Margaret, now aged 35.

“She’d cook for herself, her husband and her children. I’d be in the kitchen washing utensils. If there were any leftovers, that’s what I’d eat.  She starved me.”

When Margaret was 14, she decided to run away. Another girl said she would help her earn money to travel home to her mother.

Her friend took her to a man’s house. When dusk fell, the girl and her boyfriend said they were going to the shop. Margaret was left with the owner of the house who was a middle-aged man.

“I was very stupid. I didn’t understand about men,” she said.

He refused to allow her to leave.

The man bought her a soda and locked her in his bedroom. The drink was laced with some kind of drug and she soon fell asleep in a chair.

“When I woke up, I was shocked. I was in the man’s bed and I was naked. Blood was coming out down below,” she recalled.

Margaret started crying and begged to be taken to hospital. But the man kept her locked in his bedroom with a plastic bucket to use as a toilet.

“The third day, the man told me: ‘You are my wife. The blood that was coming out is because you are my wife,’” she said.

Margaret soon fell pregnant but her childish body was too small to give birth normally. A local clinic referred her to Pumwani Maternity Hospital for a Caesarean.

She was detained for 12 days until her ‘husband’ raised the money to pay the bill and took her ‘home’.

Margaret spent eight years with her abuser and bore him four children. Whenever she suggested using family planning, he threatened to kill her.

Over the years, he became increasingly violent. At the age of 23, she eventually summoned up the courage to run away with the children.

Today, she struggles to make a living washing people’s clothes and plaiting hair in a Nairobi slum.

Margaret may be suing the government and the hospital for what the Center for Reproductive Rights – the US-based lobby group which is representing her – calls “an egregious violation” of her rights.

But her life story is one long tale of rights violations, of which, being detained in hospital is surely not the worst.

What about a child’s right to education? To food? To live with her parents? To protection from sexual exploitation?

She has no one to sue for that.

Does it matter how many wives the South African president has and whether he is faithful to them? Should we care whether he enjoys dancing semi-naked in a kilt made of animal tails?

Jacob Zuma, the ‘100 percent Zulu boy’, is a colourful polygamist with four wives and more than 20 children.

South African artists have portrayed him with his genitals exposed, as an erect penis and with a shower growing out of his head – a reference to his comment that he took a shower after having sex to reduce the chance of contracting HIV.

But, experts warn, his influence upon one of Africa’s most progressive countries is deeply corrosive.

He is – once again – shamelessly using tradition and culture to justify sexism in a country where there is an epidemic of violence against women: from the ‘curative’ rape of lesbians (to make them straight) to that of babies.

He provocatively brands those who disagree with him unAfrican – a loaded term to use in a country with such an ugly racial past.

“Let us not be influenced by other cultures… Let us solve African problems the African way, not the white man’s way,” he saidlast month, accusing those who criticise tradition as “too clever”.

Zuma, who did not go to school until he was jailed on Robben Island in his early 20s, said educated liberal South Africans don’t understand who they are.

“If you are not an African, you cannot be a white. Then what are you? What are you? You don’t know,” he said, before characteristically switching into Zulu to emphasis his African identity.

Zuma was expressing his support for a bill which would subject 18 million South Africans living in the densely populated former ‘homelands’ to traditional courts ruled over by chiefs applying customary law.

They would be compelled to live under this separate justice system, rather than being able to choose, as they can today, to use the civil courts.

Six out of 10 of those who would be affected would be women, often grandmothers and single mothers who rely on pensions and child grants to get by.

Women’s rights experts warn the bill could turn back the clock for South Africa’s young democracy and undo the gains women have made since the end of apartheid.

BLAMED THE VICTIM

It is a game Zuma has played before.

His controversial use of culture to serve his own political interests dates back to his 2006 trial – in which he was found not guilty – for the alleged rape of a 31-year-old family friend.

He blamed the victim, saying that she was dressed provocatively in a traditional wrap-around kanga which meant that she was sexually aroused.

“In the Zulu culture, you don’t leave a woman in that situation [sexually aroused] because if you do then she will even have you arrested and say that you are a rapist,” he told the court.

In other words, she wanted it.

Thembisa Waetjen, who teaches history at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, argues that Zuma sought to show that “culture, in fact, was the real agent on trial.”

He deliberately spoke in Zulu throughout the trial to emphasis the alien nature of the English-style court room.

Having a president who emphasises ‘traditional’ notions of masculinity and refuses to criticise African cultural practices legitimises such abuses, experts say.

There is a “widespread belief in men’s entitlement to women’s bodies,” says Nolwazi Mkhwanaz, an anthropology lecturer at the University of Witwatersrand.

Many South African men simply don’t see anything wrong with raping women.

One in four admit to being rapists. One in three boys over 11 believe girls enjoy being raped.

“I can’t look at him and not think about his dick. He’s made his entire identity about this incredibly hyper-sexualised being,” said Nomboniso Gasa, who writes on women’s rights.

“I think it’s a very dangerous thing… Cultural identity has become the code word for misogyny.”

In Gasa’s home province of Eastern Cape, there has been an upsurge in the practice of ukosula, a tradition where young men who come back from being circumcised in the mountains are allowed to have sex with any young woman. Ukosula means “to wipe yourself” in Xhosa.

When Gasa was growing up, there were only two such incidents.

“Now, almost every circumcision season, people’s daughters are being used as rags upon which initiates ‘wipe themselves’,” she said.

As I listen to the girls’ stories, coaxed out with hot tears, I struggle to find an answer to this question: what makes a man rape a young girl?

Mercy Chidi, who runs Tumani Girls Rescue Centre in the Kenyan town of Meru, has several theories. She has dealt with over 240 rape cases since she opened the centre in 2006, including cases involving girls as young as three.

“We have had several girls who have been sexually abused by their immediate relatives, like a grandfather, an uncle, because they believe they are going to get cured of HIV,” she said.

“A few men have bragged they want to be the first to deflower the flower. So when a girl is young they want to be to the ones to experience this girl.”

None of it makes sense to me.

The only answer I can come up with is that the men don’t really understand the gravity of what they are doing.

“I don’t think he cares what he did,” said Alice, who was raped when she was 12 years old by one of her father’s relatives.

Her parents often sent her to wait at his house after school until they finished work.

The man, a father in his 40s, told Alice to serve him food in the living room.

“When I was taking the food to him, he grabbed me and covered my mouth,” she said, fidgeting with a string on her trousers as we sat in Tumani’s sparse counselling room.

“He said he would kill me if I told anyone.”

Alice told her mother who went to the police. But they refused to look for the perpetrator unless she paid a bribe.

Three years later, Alice has not been able to move on with her life.

“Sometimes my father drinks and he reminds me about it. He insults me. He says I took myself there,” she cried, wiping her nose on her blue polo shirt.

The perpetrator’s wife, who lives three minutes from her home, has told their neighbours that she is a liar.

POLICE REFUSE TO INVESTIGATE

That young girls like Alice are blamed and stigmatised for being raped is even harder to understand than the crime itself.

Delve into government statistics and you begin to understand where the problem is coming from.

• 12 percent of women age 15 to 49 say they were raped the first time they had sex.

• 45 per cent of women aged 15 to 49 have experienced physical or sexual violence.

• 53 percent of women believe it is acceptable for a man to beat his wife if she argues with him, burns food, refuses sex, goes out without telling him or neglects the children.

In a society where violence against women is so widespread – and so broadly accepted – it is easy to see why rape victims like Alice are not taken seriously.

Chidi’s efforts to win justice for the girls who pass through her centre have largely failed.

“We have lost more than 80 percent of our cases, not because the offence never happened, but because the prosecution has failed to prove their case because the investigations are not done,” she said.

The police have refused to record rapes unless the victims produce witnesses, refused to investigate allegations of incest until girls give birth to test the babies’ DNA and even locked up and threatened one girl who reported being raped by a fellow police officer.

On October 11, Chidi filed a petition in the High Court seeking to compel the police to do their job.

“It [Rape] will not be taken seriously if I know I will go to the police station and nothing will happen to me,” she said.

“But if I knew the law was working and something was being done about it, I will restrain myself.”

Her conclusion is a depressing one.

Why do men rape? Because they can get away with it.

Watching Kenyan activist Agnes Pareyio demonstrate the three different types of female genital mutilation (FGM) on a life-size plastic vagina was an eye opener to the sheer brutality of the practice.

It laid bare its function – to control women’s sexuality – and their powerlessness in the communities where it is practised.

When Pareyio, who runs a refuge for girls who have run away from FGM, told me that a Maasai woman is “just like the property of the husband” she was not exaggerating.

“This is type one of female circumcision,” she said slotting a woman’s private parts between the legs.

“We call it sunna. It involves the cutting of the tip part of the clitoris.”

The spread legs, though reminiscent of a porn movie, looked pretty normal to me, apart from the missing clitoris – though hardly something you would expect to be shown by a middle-aged Kenyan woman dressed in full Maasai regalia.

“This is excision. Excision is practiced by our tribe,” she continued, replacing the first model with what, to me, appeared a less realistic-looking one. There were no vaginal lips, just a large slit between the legs like a doll.

“They cut the clitoris… the labia majora and the labia minora, leaving a scar.”

But it was the third one that was the real shocker.

It was just solid plastic with some white lines – like a small drawing of a television aerial – across the space where the opening should be. When you looked carefully, you could see a little hole towards the bottom to let the urine and menstrual blood through.

“This is infibulation. It is practiced by the Somalis and a tribe called the Pokots,” Pareyio said, referring to two ethnic groups in Kenya.

After excision, the girl is stitched up until her wedding day. She is literally a gift; a parcel to be cut open by the man.

Among the Pokots, the best man takes a goat’s horn and punches a hole between the bride’s legs, Pareyio said.

EVERYBODY WAS AGAINST ME

Pareyio has saved hundreds of girls from FGM by providing them with a home at the Tasaru Girls Rescue Centre [link to our video] in Narok County, 100 km west of the capital, Nairobi.

By sending them to school, she has opened up a world of opportunities that never existed at home.

“My father never liked education,” said 16-year-old Jackline Seleina, who ran away at the age of 12 to avoid being cut.

“In the whole village, no one is interested in education.”

Seleina now aspires to become a journalist.

With their whispering voices and modest long skirts, you realise what guts it has taken these young girls to come here.

Seleina has never been back home because she fears her father would beat her up.

“I did not have any support… even all my uncles and aunts, everybody was against me,” she said in a quavering voice.

Pareyio is on the right track as FGM thrives where women are denied the right to education.

According to the Kenyan government, 54 per cent of women with no education have been circumcised compared to just 19 per cent with some secondary education.

“No mother that goes to school can agree the daughter to be cut again,” said Pareyio.

But girls are being circumcised at a younger age – before they are aware of what is being planned or old enough to run away.

Half of today’s teenage girls (aged 14–19) who have been cut say it was done when they were less than 10 years old. In the previous generation (aged 45-49), only 14 percent were cut at such a young age.

Although Pareyio’s model vaginas convinced me, it will take hundreds more women like her to end FGM in Kenya.

It helps to kill the acrid stench that sticks in the back of your throat.

But the experience of visiting Nairobi’s largest dumpsite – sited right in the midst of a sea of corrugated iron-roofed slum houses — stuck in my mind for days afterwards.

Every time I threw away small amounts of food, I wrapped them carefully in a plastic bag.

I could not ignore the horrible fact that my rubbish would be sorted through by many hands, scavenging for something to eat or sell.

DUMPSITE A SOURCE OF FOOD

Dandora’s 30-acre dumpsite is a source of survival for many people living in the surrounding slums.

According to a report released on Tuesday by the charity Concern Worldwide, 10,000 Nairobians make a living from it.

“Over half of those who scour the dump on a daily basis are under 18 and many are even as young as 10 years old,” Anne O’Mahony, Concern Worldwide’s Kenya country director said in a statement.

“Most of these children have dropped out of school to sort out and recycle waste.”

Despite being declared full in 2001, 2,000 of tonnes of rubbish are dumped on the site every day, including hazardous chemical and hospital wastes.

It’s so famous, it even features on a Lonely Planet discussion forum.

“Is it possible for a lone tourist?” asked one woman planning a trip to Kenya.

CORROSIVE CHEMICALS, BRAIN DAMAGE

The dumpsite is easy to find. The Marabou storks circling over it are visible from a distance.

Empty Cadbury’s hot chocolate bottles and old toothbrushes line the dusty path down to the site, hoping for a buyer. I can’t imagine who would buy them.

The two grandmothers we interviewed working on the site had worked there for over 20 years. They spent their days doubled over, collecting plastic bags sold to a middleman on the edge of the dump.

They earned 100 shillings ($1.20) a day which went towards feeding their grandchildren.

One old woman had lost half of her finger after touching some corrosive substance while working on the site.

Concern has called for the site to be closed down.

“The location of the dump for the city of Nairobi in the middle of a dense urban population is unacceptable,” said Mahoney.

“To improve the health of the population the dump has to be closed.”

Their demand is not new.

A 2007 report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) found that half of the children living around the dumpsite had high concentrations of lead in their blood, likely to damage their brains and nervous systems.

Almost half of the kids were also suffering from respiratory diseases.

“Asthma, anaemia and skin infections are by now endemic,” said Njoroge Kimani, author of the UNEP report.

But plans to relocate the dumpsite to a new landfill in Ruai, on the eastern side of the city, have floundered.

Kenya Airports Authority says the new site is too close to the flight path, increasing the risk of bird damage to flights, Concern said.

It seems unlikely that the dumpsite will be closed down any time soon.

Until then, I’ll keep sealing my burnt crusts and rotten fruit in plastic bags for someone else’s lunch.

The saddest part of the stories told by 40 HIV-positive Kenyan women who are suing the government for forced or coercive sterilisation is not that they can no longer give birth.

Most already have children, often more than they can comfortably provide for.

“Getting food is a problem,” said Pamela Adeka, who was sterilised after giving birth to twins in 2004.

She later gave them up for adoption as she could not afford to raise them and now lives with her HIV-positive, 14-year-old son.

What struck me was their poverty, joblessness and desperate wish to have more children just to secure a roof over their heads.

“I can miss a place to stay because I can’t give birth,” said Sem, a widow living in Nairobi’s Kibera slum who has given birth 10 times, quoted in Robbed of Choice, a recent study by the African Gender and Media Initiative.

“I have now met a man and he says he wants to live with me… how will I live with him when I cannot give him children?”

For these women, mostly poor and uneducated, marriage is the key to financial security.

And if you are to hold on to a man, you have to give him children.

“In Africa, you have to be called someone’s wife,” Ruth Achieng, another sterilised widow told me, sitting in the rented room which she shares with her two daughters in Kibera.

Achieng’s neat room has a television and electricity, unlike many of their neighbours in the stinking, overcrowded slum.

Yet the 30-year-old mother struggles to provide for her two girls, aged nine and 12.

“I’m jobless. If someone calls me, I go and wash clothes. I get something for my family to eat and we survive,” she said.

Such casual jobs for other slum residents rarely pay more than a couple of dollars a day.

“If they hadn’t done the operation, life would be different,” she said, suddenly sounding like a naïve Cinderella.

“Even if I didn’t have means to make a living, I would have hope that I could get a man and that he would marry me.”

The pressure to have more children, when you are already struggling to feed your existing ones, seems perverse.

Yet interviewee after interviewee pointed out the importance of motherhood in “African culture”.

Yes, these women’s reproductive rights had been violated when they were sterilised. But it was their everyday powerlessness compared with the men in their lives that hit me hardest.

ECONOMICALLY DEPENDENT ON MEN

Several husbands cynically plotted with medical workers to sterilise their wives without their knowledge. Many then abandoned them for other women with whom they had more children.

Selina’s husband signed sterilisation forms without her knowledge. He then sent her away from their home because he “could not live with a woman who cannot give birth” and took away their children.

Jane’s husband was unhappy that she had given birth to four girls. He wanted a son.

When Jane was admitted to hospital with malaria, her husband and the doctor decided to sterilise her. He then married a second wife, leaving her to raise their four daughters alone.

Reading these testimonies and speaking to these women, I felt suffocated by their limited horizons and life choices.

Men had mistreated them. But they still felt they needed another man to survive.

When women are so economically dependent upon men, how much control do they really have over whether and when to give birth?

While the doctors who illegally sterilised them denied them the chance to have more children, poverty and culture have made it hard for them to stop giving birth.

Either way, they have been robbed of a genuine choice.

NAIROBI (AlertNet) – It’s bucketing down outside, washing away houses and people and causing total gridlock in the city’s evening rush hour.

And when you finally make it home and switch on your tap, it’s dry.

It’s infuriating.

In Nairobi, private water vendors do a booming business, selling water in 20-litre jerrycans to the poor and in 4,000-litre tankers to the rich.

City residents are the lucky ones. In rural areas, women and children walk for hours to collect water from streams and wells.

In the 80 percent of Kenya that is arid or semi-arid, people struggle to stay alive during recurrent bouts of drought and hunger.

MORE WATER THAN EUROPE

It needn’t be like this.

Kenya receives enough rain to supply the needs of six to seven times its 40 million people, according to a 2006 study by the United Nations Environment Programme and World Agroforestry Centre.

The same story applies across Africa, which receives enough rain to supply the needs of 9 billion people. The continent’s population is around 1 billion.

“Africa is seen as a dry continent. But overall, it actually has more water resources per capita than Europe,” Dennis Garrity, director general of the World Agroforestry Centre, said in a statement to launch the report.

Yet most of it is untapped, flowing straight into the sea.

For AlertNet’s latest special package, The Battle for Water, we travelled to Kajiado County, an hour’s drive south of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

In Nalepo Primary School, the children run to the water pump twice a day to fetch water for their school. They often miss lessons, queuing for water with the local livestock.

When the pump runs dry, there’s no water to cook their lunch and the children don’t eat.

“A hungry child cannot learn. A hungry stomach cannot concentrate,” said headteacher Benjamin Moonka.

Water shortages impoverish the entire Maasai community, who depend upon livestock to survive. Last year, there was a terrible drought which killed thousands of animals.

Many families migrated in search of water, pulling their children out of school.

“They just move, they forget books and when they come back, they were like they were coming to start afresh,” said Moonka.

In nearby Sajiloni Primary School, gutters catch rain as it falls on classroom roofs and pipes carry it into a storage tank.

This simple rainwater harvesting system has transformed learning in the school, increasing both enrollment and grades as children no longer waste time fetching water.

Our ‘Tale of Two Schools’ video makes it clear that Africa’s water crisis is not caused by a lack of rain but a lack of investment in life-saving solutions.

Picture caption: Boys from Nalepo Primary School carry water back to their school in semi-arid Kajiado County, south of Kenya’s capital Nairobi. The school depends on students fetching water before coming to class. The headteacher says enrolment has fallen as drought has forced people to migrate. Picture taken June 12, 2012. REUTERS/Noor Khamis

“Will you pass by and see her?” Anne asked me, nodding to her two-year-old daughter who was playing barefoot in the nearby dirt with another young girl.

It’s amazing how children can laugh amidst utter squalor that makes adults want to weep.

As a journalist, you often spend your time trying to get people to open up to you, to tell you their most intimate thoughts.

And what do you offer in return? A vague hope that telling their story will ‘make a difference’?

I ducked Anne’s question, busying myself with my tripod.

We were filming Anne as part of the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s special coverage package on food security and innovations, called Solutions for a Hungry World.

Urban hunger is a growing problem in Kenya. Yet it attracts much less attention than the traditional image of hunger – livestock herders hit by drought in the country’s arid north.

Anne lives in Nairobi’s sprawling Kibera slum, often tagged the largest slum in sub-Saharan Africa, minutes away from glitzy bistros and shopping malls thronged by Kenya’s growing middle class.

Rachel Weisz was filmed for the movie adaptation of John Le Carre’s The Constant Gardener here, earning it a certain kind of edgy glamour.

We spent two days hopping across open sewers and navigating rubbish-strewn pathways in the sweltering heat to find a family to illustrate our story.

One woman we judged too plump.

The lighting in several dank homes was too poor to take any pictures.

I didn’t have the guts to spend the day with a deaf grandmother who looks after 12 children. Just driving past kids begging by the roadside at night makes my heart ache, overwhelmed with helplessness.

Eventually, we settled on Anne.

NO SCHOOL, NO FUTURE?

Her husband was a construction worker but he’d been sick with typhoid for two months. She was trying to make ends meet by washing clothes for her slightly less impoverished slum neighbours.

The shoot was hard work. The family lived in darkness because they couldn’t afford electricity or paraffin. We had to bring our own light to film her children drinking black tea at dawn.

Anne was tired and distracted. She hadn’t eaten properly for days, even weeks.

I felt ashamed asking her to walk down the street a third time, trying not to get irritated because she kept spoiling the shot by looking into the camera. It was draining for all of us.

It was only once she’d eaten lunch that some life returned to her face; the ability to smile, to interact with other people.

You could literally see the energy from the food seeping into her body.

After finishing the shoot on Friday night, I lay in bed thinking about Anne’s oldest son.

He wasn’t going to school because his mum couldn’t raise the 800 shilling ($10) fee.

Despite having had no breakfast, he refused to come and eat lunch. He was shy and awkward, maybe also a little angry, preferring to loiter outside with others queuing at the water point.

I wondered what his future would be. Would he be carjacking me at gunpoint in a few years’ time out of desperation?

Part of me felt like I should help Anne and her family. But another part of me feared I would be sliding into a situation I couldn’t handle.

Where do you draw the line between being a reporter and a fellow human?