Debora Achieng Nembi, Kenya

Educator & Advocate for Women's Health, Hygiene, and Food Security

Today’s post is a re-post from my International Women’s Day series published earlier this year on the Spaghetti Twisted Thoughts Substack.

Meet Debora Achieng Nembi, a 37-year old mother, educator, permaculture teacher and advocate for girls’ menstrual hygiene and health. I know her from her work at PermoAfrica Centre in Homa Bay, Kenya and as an educator with Tangneduk Youth Group; I’ve given to both groups in the last five years.

Homa Bay County is located in Western Kenya, near Lake Victoria. Upwards of 75% of the population engages in agricultural activity.

She is married to

Paul odiwuor Ogola

who is founder of PermoAfrica Centre, a permaculture training center. Together they have five 5 children - 3 boys and 2 girls. She is a passionate educator and advocate in all areas of her life.

From 2010 to 2019 she managed a community-based school that struggled due to lack of sufficent infrastructure and basic amenities. With the COVID-19 pandemic, all schools were shut. When they were reopened, educational reforms were introduced by the Kenyan government. The new system forced her to close down the school as many of her students were forced to enroll in various public schools supported by the government. This left with her too few children to serve and insufficient financial support to operate; the mission of the school was to serve vulnerable children and orphans.

Even so, with most of her former students now in high school, some were not able to continue their education to due to their family’s inability to pay required ancillary school fees such as supplies and uniforms. Other children drop out to work on their family farms or find other sources of income to help their family survive.

“My dream is just that if I can get support on how to build structures and good learning facilities, I wish to start it again. What I would like to do is to support vulnerable school girls and women by providing them with sanitary towels. This has been a very big problem and majority of school girls drop out of school because their parents can't meet their basic needs and they become shy. In our community we have vulnerable women suffering from abject poverty.”

Debora is telling me something I should be aware of but am not. There is such a thing as “period poverty”, defined as “a lack of access to menstrual products, hygiene facilities, waste management, and education.” In Kenya 65% of girls and women cannot afford sanitary pads. Seven out of ten girls miss a week of school monthly as a result. While the Kenyan Basic Education Act amendment of 2017 stipulated that free and quality sanitary towels be provided in government schools, significant barriers still exist according to AMREF, an international nonprofit committed to driving community-led and people-centered primary health care systems while addressing social determinants of health.

Debora’s desires to help don’t stop at education for women about menstrual health and hygiene. She is also helping women through the PermoAfrica Centre, a non-governmental organization run by her husband Paul, to learn how to sack garden.

Sack Garden? Yes! Sack gardening. If you’ve heard of it or plan on trying it, please let me know! I’ve done container gardening in durable canvas sacks on my driveway, but not like this.

Debora says, “I love teaching sack gardens because I can share with other women and it's very easy to manage. We make organic kitchen gardens using sacks as a gardening technique. If I had the funds, I could purchase more sacks and organic seeds then distribute to them. As a result, they would become economically self sustainable and food secure.”

A simple Google of “sack gardens” yields a lot of hits. Apparently is a popular food security strategy. One website suggests using a burlack coffee sack or feed sack, 3 cubic feet of soil, gravel/rocks, a large yogurt container, and seedlings.

“In our village, we have so many knowledge to restore, tears to wipe but this can be achieved through engaging vulnerable women through permaculture, knowledge and skill transfer.”

I asked Debora what her youth was like, curious where her passion comes from. In just a few sentences, she conveyed her challenges and likely the source of her empathy and activism: “My mother died when I was 8 yrs old and we were left with 2 boys and 1 girl. I went through a lot with my step mother and I thank God that I am still live.”

We had little time to connect this weekend. Debora’s phone is broken, her only means of communication. But not for long. We were able to work out a plan to get her a phone this week. I look forward to FaceTiming her soon and learning some expert tips for sack gardening!

Extra! Debora’s favorite vegetable to prepare is kale. “You can fry it and also boil it and drink the soup which is nutritious and best for eye sight.”

Reflection

After doing the interview with Debora for this post, I sent her another message apologizing for not posting it sooner. As part of my apology, I wrote, mother to mother, “As you well know having children makes it difficult to fit other things in.”

Like a true activist (which reminds me about my post about not giving up called “You Are An Essayist”), she said “True, but it’s a matter of trying.”

True, but it’s a matter of trying.

That really hit me, almost as if I hadn’t ever heard it before. Yes. We each face our own set of challenges. True. But, it’s a matter of trying.

Thank you, Debora, for being so open, for all of the passion you put in to your work, and your commitment to helping girls and women eat healthy and stay healthy in more ways than one. And, thank you for reminding me it’s just a matter of trying.

Where in the world is Debora?