Laguna group focuses on giving Kenyan girls a way out of their horror

Kenyan girls destined for genital mutilation and arranged marriages have been given a lifeline.

The nonprofit With My Own Two Hands, started five years ago by South Laguna resident and former professional basketball player Lindsey Pluimer, will break ground in the next two weeks on a new dormitory at a rescue center in Kajiado, Kenya.

The facility will house 42 girls ages 9 to 18 and accompany an existing 42-bed dormitory and the Africa Inland Church boarding school.

Women at the rescue center teach classes, prepare food and try to reconcile girls with their families. The new dormitory will offer the same services.

Demand from more girls seeking to escape a life of servitude prompted foundation officials to build an additional facility.

“The goal of this project is educating the community [in Kenya and elsewhere] about the cultural tendencies that are not safe,” Pluimer said by phone Monday. “We’re trying to build awareness and take the power out of men’s hands.”

Word about the foundation’s effort has spread.

A screening of the 20-minute documentary “Maasai Daughters” last month in Newport Beach generated $61,000, with an additional $9,000 coming in the last few weeks.

The amounts raised are enough to cover the cost of building the dormitory and provide supplies such as beds and desks.

The film is about the lives of three girls and the women who rescued them from harmful traditional practices.

Girls in the Maasai Mara region are typically sold into marriage to manage the husband’s land and tend to his cattle, sacrificing any hope of an education or employment.

Circumcision for Kenyan girls — cutting out the clitoris and perhaps other parts using a blade or razor, sometimes without anesthesia — was outlawed in 2011, but tradition appears to have superseded the law. Pluimer said the ban is difficult to enforce.

“In the Maasai culture, they believe that if a girl has not gone through the cut, who is going to marry that girl?” teacher Lucy Yepe says in the film, directed by Samantha Andre.

In the movie, Teacher Hellen Inoti adds: “The Maasai men are polygamist, so female genital mutilation is a way of taming the woman” for control.

The dormitory is one of several projects that With My Own Two Hands officials are involved in.

“In order to diminish poverty we must start with the children,” the organization’s website says. “Our goal is to ensure that children in need have the necessities of shelter, education, water, and agriculture.”

Pluimer, 29, starred at San Clemente High and UCLA before joining the professional basketball ranks, playing for teams in Australia and Spain.

But a trip to a South African orphanage in 2010 altered her perspective and priorities.

“My whole life was about me, my career, my stats,” Pluimer said. “Once I went to Africa, things flipped and I started to see the bigger picture.”

She said she saw desperation, and hope, in the eyes of African children.

“They reminded me that it’s not what you have that creates happiness,” she said. “They were truly an inspiration to me and the reason I started With My Own Two Hands.

“I told myself I can’t not do anything. Even if I raise $5,000, that can make a difference.”

The organization’s efforts are working, program director Joel Misango wrote in an email.

“The change/feel on the ground is immense,” said Misango, who was born and raised in a village outside of Eldoret and now lives in Nairobi. “We have touched so many lives in so many ways of our giving back to the society.

“We can’t have enough of the smiles we have put on these young souls — a revival of hope in their life and a meaning and above all to make them feel loved and have a place in the society.”

For more information about With My Own Two Hands, visit withmyown2hands.org.