Robin Wiszowaty

In high school, I seemed like your average student. An athlete, an honour role student. I even performed in musicals. But inside I felt a rising sense of frustration. I longed to break free from my high school hallways! I didn't know what I wanted but I just knew in my heart there simply had to be more. By the time I went to university, I realized I couldn't do it anymore. I needed to start over in life - go to a place so far from my current reality that I couldn't rely on language or technology, a place where no one knew me. Through a series of serendipitous connections - in particular a professor who knew a colleague in Nairobi who knew of a rural Maasai village - I gave away most everything I owned, said goodbye to my family, and flew to Kenya.

Soon I was waking up to chickens and cows, bathing in a bucket, living with 13 new family members in rural Maasai land. "Naserian, amka! Saa ya kuenda magi," Robin, wake up! Time to go fetch water! Mama woke me up every morning to a day of fetching wood, water, cooking over a fire, washing clothes by hand, sweeping our dirt floor with dried grass bristles. My world was flipped upside down. My hands got second-degree burns from the equatorial sun. I didn't enjoy malaria, typhoid, or jiggers. Concepts I had learned about, like poverty, gender inequality, lack of access to healthcare and drought, felt very real to me. They were not statistics but practical survival challenges of my Maasai Mama, brothers, sisters, and community members.

My new family added to the foundation that my Chicago parents provided: They offered generosity and showed me what 'taking care of someone,' really means. Through them I learned what it really means to live in a community, and what type of person I could become. Now I work with Free The Children as the Kenya Program Director - implementing our Adopt A Village development model. I sit under acacia trees with women involved in our Me to We Artisans program, doing financial literacy workshops, travel across the Maasai Mara doing needs assessments of communities, and source cheap beans and maize to stretch our Food Program budget. With our Free The Children and Me To We families, we invite everyone to do small things every day to create a world we're proud of.

Robin's Must-Haves

• Follow Robin on Twitter
• Read Robin's book My Maasai Life
• Book Robin as a speaker
• Travel to Kenya just like Robin did