Nice Lengete - The Girls in the Wild Fig Tree - How I Fought to Save Myself, My Sister, and Thousands of Girls Worldwide

W hen I was born, people said I had smooth skin and bright eyes. My parents gave me the nickname Karembo, meaning beautiful.

I still like to tease my older sister, Soila, that when she was born, no one called her Karembo. My mother said that when she came out, her skin was wrinkled and her head ended in a sharp point. Even those who looked with the most loving eyes had to admit that she looked a little like a conehead.

We were wanted and loved, coneheads or not. To a Maasai, no man is wealthy unless he has many cattle and many children. As soon as a baby is born, the father hosts a large party. There is tea and roasted meat for everyone, and people bring presents for the family. My father liked to show us off to his friends. He brought a coworker, a white English speaker, to my celebration.

Isnt she a pretty one? he said, watching me smile. Nice baby, nice baby, he cooed.

I like that, said my father. We will call her Nice.

He also named me Retiti, after the oretiti tree that grows in our part of Kenya. It spreads by sending down shoots that form new trunks, and after many years, walking beneath a single tree can feel like walking through a massive grove.

Some people use oretiti bark for medicine. The wood is strong, good for making sticks to help herd animals. The tree produces figs to feed animals and people. It offers shade in a part of Kenya that is often dry and dusty. In the days before most of us converted to Christianity, people would pray under the branches of the tree and make offerings of cow or sheep blood in times of trouble. Some still pray there; the many trunks of the oretiti can feel as cool and sacred as a cathedral.

The oretiti, people say, has many branches. It is a single tree, but it can support many people.

When I was young, the children would tease me for the name. Ret-tet-tet, they would say, like a bird drumming on a hollow log. I hated the name and I picked a new oneNailanteiinstead. It was a traditional girls name with no special meaning; I chose it because it sounded nice.

My aunty Grace says the old name suits me better. Like the oretiti, she says, I have grown to hold many people in my arms. I have sent down roots not just in my hometown but all over the world. People depend on me, Grace says, and if I fell, many people would weep.

It is hard for me to think of myself that wayin my heart, I still feel like a simple village childbut Aunty Grace has a point. I have devoted my life to saving girls from female genital mutilation (FGM), a brutal and sometimes deadly procedure. I have traveled throughout the world, met kings and celebrities, given speeches and received awards. I have helped save thousands of girls. I am still rooted in a small Kenyan town, but I have spread my branches wide.

It is fitting that I was named for a tree because it was a tree that saved my life when I ran away from FGM. Without that tree to hide me, my family would have cut off my clitoris. I might have literally died from FGM, but even if I had survived, I would have experienced a different kind of death. I was a young girl, but after the cut I would have been considered a woman, and I would have been married to an older man. I would have dropped out of school. I would have worked myself to exhaustion every day caring for my husband and children. Instead, because of that tree, my life has branched out into something entirely different. That tree gave me my life, the one I have now, the one that my father could not have dreamed of when he held me in his arms and called me Nice.