i was born 25 years ago in a small dusty villlage in the sourthern part of kenya- former Machakos district. this is one of the semi arid areas of our country and erking out a living is quite hard. a large population of my community rely on relief food because rains are hardly enough.i remember the days when we would line up at lunch time in the village school to receive our portion of yellow maize meal without anything else.as young as we were, we knew that our fate had already been predetermined by the condition we found ourselves in,we had no hopes, no aspirations,nothing,as children would joke that we were consuming food (corn) meant for horses. that what we were consuming as our only food for the day was animal-food on the other side of the world, where that world was we had no idea.it is from this background that i have risen from. it has shaped me to be who i am today.i am the third born and the last of the girls in a family of six children. my mother is my inspirition by the meare fact that she was and still is the sole bread winner for the family.between my elder sister amd me there is a gap of six years.i grew up alone.by the time i was 8 my sister was already 14 and starting her secondary school education in a boarding school.mother worked fulltime as a school teacher and of course father was never present. i grew up being taken care by stranges.i cannot in any way blame my mother because as a woman she had to work. it is within this background the story of my life emerges.