Organization for Survival of Illaikipiak Indigenous Masai Group Initiative

And in the Masai community, goats and cows are the most valued possession.

Jaclyn was 14 years old and she was in her Masai family and there's a drought in Kenya.

So, seven years ago Agnes built the first V Day safe house in Narok, Kenya, in the Masai land.

In Kenya's Masai community indigenous girls occupy a transitional position between their parents' family and that of their husbands.

So, one afternoon, she'd heard about the safe house, Jaclyn left her father's house and she walked for two days, two days through Masai land.

In Kenya, boarding schools for Masai girls, who cannot easily attend schools because they are located far away and because of a lack of resources and efficient transport, have facilitated these girls' access to the education system.

Participants in the ceremony in New York included representatives of the American Indian Community House (United States of America) and the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (Ecuador), and a representative of the Mosiro Masai people (Kenya).

The Sami parliaments of Finland, Norway and Sweden, for instance, had institutionalized their cooperation within a new Sami parliamentary council, and in 1997 a seminar bringing together Sami, Ogoni and Masai indigenous groups had been held in Finnish Lapland.

Anyway, we arrived, and when we arrived, there were hundreds of girls dressed in red, homemade dresses which is the color of the Masai and the color of V Day and they greeted us, and they had made up these songs that they were singing about the end of suffering, and the end of mutilation, and they walked us down the path.

Many interesting and successful examples of this can be seen, for example among the Maori of Aotearoa New Zealand, some of the First Nations in Canada, the Sami in the Nordic countries, the Mapuche in Chile, the Quechua in Ecuador, the Masai in Kenya, the Ratanakiri in Cambodia, among the Sungai in Malaysia, the Chakma in India and many others.

20. At its first meeting the Advisory Group identified the project s goals and the need to set up an indigenous team for the project within the WHO structure and the possible implementation of six pilot projects in the following indigenous communities (i) Anka Hill Tribe, Thailand (ii) Masai community, Kenya (iii) Tonga community, Tonga (iv) Chechua community, Argentina (v) Chukotkan community, Siberia, Russian Federation and (vi) Miskito community, Nicaragua.