By Marcia Eldredge

Sioni Ayubu Mollel ’18 was amused that some of her Brewster peers complained about the five-minute walk to downtown from campus. And she had good reason. For six years she awoke at 4:45 a.m. and by 5 a.m. she was on her way to school – an hour and twenty-minute walk through the arid landscape of the Monduli Hills of northern Tanzania. This journey, along with her disciplined study habits, would eventually take Sioni to the Orkeeswa School in her native Tanzania and then to a postgraduate year at Brewster, 12,000 kilometers from her family, and now to her freshman year at Franklin & Marshall College.

Sioni is Maasai, a tribe of semi-nomadic pastoral people who live along the border of northern Tanzania and southern Kenya on land that once belonged to the Maasai but now is mostly home to wildlife reserves and national parks.

The daughter of a farmer and a school teacher, Sioni always knew her parents would seek the best education possible for her and her siblings, even if that meant walking nearly 90 minutes to and from the only “nearby” school in the region.

A SECONDARY OPPORTUNITY
Peter Luis, founder and executive director of the Indigenous Education Foundation of Tanzania, founded Orkeeswa School in 2008. In a country where less than a quarter of the population has access to secondary school, the tuition-free Orkeeswa School is the only opportunity for most of the students in the under-served Orkeeswa Village community to continue their education beyond the primary level.

It was evident to Peter early on that Sioni would seize her education opportunity not just for the betterment of herself but for her community as well. “I always knew that Sioni had the intellect and curiosity for success,” Peter said. “She was the hardest worker, the best leader. We looked for Sioni to be a role model here.”

In turn, Sioni has proven Peter an astute judge of character. She has impacted her local community by opening up dialogue about long-held cultural norms. Along with a few classmates and staff, she wrote and helped produce a film that depicts the struggle between culture and education in their community. As members of the first generation to attend school, girls can struggle with expectations of Maasai traditions such as arranged marriages in early adolescence. Although education is now available to girls and boys beyond the primary school level, not all families see the opportunities afforded their daughters as advantageous or the right path for their families and daughters.  

In fact, most of the girls with whom Sioni graduated primary school are now married with multiple children, Peter said.

This dialogue was opened thanks in part to the expert guidance of independent film maker Elizabeth Nichols, director of strategy and special projects at Orkeeswa. While Sioni was at Orkeeswa, Nichols had asked two students if they could make a film, what story would they want to tell. “They told me they wanted to tell a story about early marriage in order to educate their community and encourage them to take girls to school. They gathered a few of their classmates and, during a two-week long filmmaking workshop, we wrote and produced Black Head Cow,” explained Nichols on the school’s website.

Sioni became a writer on the film, which follows Naserian, a primary school girl faced with the prospect of an arranged marriage. At the film’s conclusion, viewers are left to wonder what happened to Naserian. Sioni explained that the point of the film wasn’t so much to reveal Naserian’s future, a choice that ultimately wasn’t hers, but rather to show the struggles of long-held tribal traditions against the encroaching modern world and the opportunities it brings. The project was a success on many levels, including getting a debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2016.

FLUENT IN SWAHILI, ENGLISH, AND DIPLOMACY
The leadership team and teachers at Orkeeswa knew that Sioni needed challenges beyond her native Tanzania. With an established program between Orkeeswa and Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts, Sioni was able to spend part of a semester abroad immersing herself in a new school with new challenges and new friends. Groton turned out to be a launching pad for more opportunities to study in the United States. Upon graduating from Orkeeswa, a scholarship would help Sioni complete a postgraduate year at Brewster and prepare her for college in the United States. With the help of Brewster alumna Carly Mankus '03, senior assistant dean of international admissions at Franklin & Marshall, Sioni received a full scholarship to attend the Pennsylvania college.

But before Sioni would walk across the Brewster stage to receive her PG certificate and the Arthur J. Mason Award, the world stage was waiting. Out of discussions with Brewster faculty around her year-end research project – on girls’ education and empowerment in Tanzania – came an invitation to speak about child marriage and her work on Black Head Cow. The occasion was a parallel event to the 62nd Annual United Nations Commission on the Status of Women titled: It’s Time! A Collaboration to End Child Early Forced Marriage and Female Genital Mutilation.

So, one late-winter morning this past March, Sioni sat among panelists at the Roosevelt House in New York City as part of the collaborative conversation among civil society organizations, policy experts, and girl and young women activists. The panelists included two girls who survived the horrific abduction by Boko Haram in 2014, and Zahra Wakilzada, Girls Learn International leader and member of the Afghan Women’s Writing Project.

“I want to be someone that can be looked up to. I want my fellow Maasai girls to see that marriage is not the only option they have, that they could be so much more than they even know about! I want to be a role model." – Sioni Ayubu Mollel ’18

And like any smart change maker, Sioni knows where real change begins. She returned to Orkweesa school this summer to lead girls’ empowerment workshops. Lucky girls.