What It Takes to Be a Maasai Woman

I rise before dawn, when the world is still wrapped in silence

and the sky holds its breath.

The air is cold on my skin,

but a quiet fire warms me from within

the fire of my mother,

and her mother before her,

passed down like a sacred flame.

I step out of my manyatta,

and the earth greets me with its deep red memory.

I walk barefoot,

feeling the heartbeat of the land pulsing through my feet.

This is home.

This is where my spirit learned its first song.

My day is woven like beadwork

threaded with milk and water,

with children’s laughter,

with the wisdom of the elders,

with the gentle strength of women

who hold the weight of a village

and still stand tall.

But my power is not in the chores I do.

It is in the courage rising in my throat,

in the tenderness I offer,

in the bridge I build

between the old ways and the new dawn.

For a Maasai woman is both

the keeper of tradition

and the quiet architect of change.

My mother’s voice echoes in my heart:

“My daughter, you do not carry just a calabash of milk.

You carry the future.”

And so I hold that future carefully—

through community work,

through nurturing nature,

through planting seeds,

through lifting the girls whose dreams

are ready to take flight.

When evening drapes itself across the sky

and the sun melts into gold,

I walk home with fatigue on my body

yet strength in my spirit.

I look back at my footprints in the red soil,

each one a poem,

each one a promise.

To be a Maasai woman

is to be the rhythm of the earth,

the whisper of resilience,

the heartbeat of compassion,

and the living story

of strength carried in silence

and spoken in every step I take.

FAITH KATITA SUPEET