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WHEN MOURINE AKINYI joined a youth-league soccer team, she was just looking for some fun.
But when two American women showed up last May at the soccer field in Kibera--a sprawling shantytown whose tin and mud shacks blanket the hills southwest of Kenya's capital Nairobi--it marked a turning point in the 18-year-old's life.
Akinyi was selected to be one of 12 young women from the slum who would launch a reproductive-health and women's-rights project that aimed to explore difficult issues through group discussions, role-playing and photography.
Akinyi credits the program, which group members named Binti Pamoja ("Daughters United" in Kiswahili), with bolstering her confidence and steering her away from trouble. "When I was not in the group, my life was not the way it is now. I was in bad company," she said recently in an interview in Kibera.
Karen Austrian and Emily Verellen had hoped for such success stories when they conceived the project, whose first phase was a two-month session last summer.
The Americans met in Kenya during their junior year of college. Austrian, then studying at Columbia University, was researching the women's-rights movement and reproductive-health issues in Kenya. Verellen, a student at American University, was doing work with Nairobi street children.
They discovered there were numerous youth programs for boys, but not many for girls. They also observed a shortage of reproductive-health outreach programs geared primarily for young, unmarried women.
"There was definitely a need" for a reproductive-health education program targeting teenage girls, Austrian said in a phone interview from New York.
In Kenya, as in many other parts of the world, sexuality represents that aspect of life where gender inequality and public-health crises converge.
A nationwide survey of Kenyan women 12 to 24 years old found that 25 percent lost their virginity in forced sexual encounters. And Kenyan women of all ages, married and unmarried, generally lack the autonomy to refuse sex or demand that their partners use condoms.
That power imbalance frequently has deadly consequences. Young Kenyan women are becoming increasingly vulnerable to HIV, which now infects one in eight Kenyans. According to Kenya's ministry of health, the highest infection levels for women are in the 20-24 age group. Eighteen percent of women are infected with HIV within two years of becoming sexually active, the ministry found in one study.
Unintended pregnancies--from both consensual and nonconsensual sex--also are common among young Kenyan women, and they, too, can have lethal outcomes. The ministry of health estimates that 5,000 Kenyan women--many of them teenagers--die annually from illegal, unsafe abortions. (Abortion is illegal in Kenya except to save the life of the woman.)
Austrian and Verellen wanted their program to confront the precarious situation of young Kenyan women. But before they could begin to address sensitive topics relating to sexuality, gender violence and women's rights, they felt they had to approach the parents of Binti Pamoja members.
"We visited the girls' homes and families to get a better picture of [their] support level and found that, overwhelmingly, their families were grateful that their daughters were involved in the Binti Pamoja Center," Verellen said.
"They told us they did not feel comfortable speaking to them about sensitive issues due to various cultural, political, religious barriers, but they were grateful that their daughters were getting the critical information somewhere and had a safe space to talk to their friends about it," she said.
Following a couple of weeks of discussions and role-playing, Austrian and Verellen introduced another component of the program: a photography project. Group members learned to use disposable cameras, then went out into Kibera to shoot photographs that depicted a day in the life of a young woman in the slum--East Africa's largest with over 600,000 residents.
The fledgling photographers came back with photos of young women facing a variety of plights: a prostitute with HIV who is expecting another child; a girl who must work for her family instead of attending school; a young woman whose boyfriend got her pregnant then dumped her.
Binti Pamoja members compiled photo albums to show off their work and chose one photograph to write about and discuss with the group.
Akinyi selected a photo of a woman walking with her small child. "We are the same as men in every way," Akinyi wrote in her essay to accompany the photograph. "Why is it that women are not given a chance to make our dreams come true? Instead of us doing what we want, we are forced to do what we don't want to do, and if we refuse, we are beaten to death by the men."
"Chances are, they had the exact kind of problem as the woman they took the picture of," Austrian said.
With the photos, though, the young women could feel more comfortable discussing difficult topics, she said. "If we had just asked, 'Who's been raped,' that would have been a conversation-stopper," she said.
An exhibition of about 70 of the group's photographs has shown in Nairobi and New York.
The exhibition will be on display at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at the end of this month, and may show at the World Bank headquarters in Washington sometime later this year, Austrian said.
Austrian and Verellen, who both reside in New York, are returning to Kibera in August with plans to expand Binti Pamoja and bring in additional members. New projects will include a community newsletter, an educational drama group and an HIV peer-education program.
The goal, Austrian said, is for Binti Pamoja members to acquire "the technical knowledge and the communication and leadership skills to be leaders in their community."
Akinyi, for one, seems inspired to become one of those leaders. Reflecting on what Binti Pamoja has meant for her, she says, "I want all the ladies in Kibera to change."