Introduction: My Story and Challenging the Feminist Funding Gap

It was 1992 and refugees were arriving in Nairobi, fleeing growing civil unrest in the neighboring countries of Rwanda and Burundi. I began studying public international law at the University of Nairobi and volunteering a couple times a week at the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) center—filing documents, finding applications, and fetching the weirdly milky tea that was brought to Kenya by the British colonialists centuries ago. When I signed up at the age of 21 to go to Nairobi as part of a law school study abroad program, I knew nothing about the history or crisis, at the time, of the former Ruanda‐Urundi territory, which had been colonized by Belgium after WWI, and later split in half during their 1962 liberation. But gradually I learned that the Hutu‐Tutsi ethnic group strife stemmed from class warfare, with the Tutsis perceived to have greater wealth and social status (as well as favoring cattle ranching over what is seen as the lower‐class farming of the Hutus). Between 1990 and 1993, government officials directed massacres of the Tutsi, killing hundreds.

While studying and working in Nairobi, I met a woman named Innocent. When I entered Innocent's braiding salon near the central business district of Nairobi for the first time, I was amazed by the diversity of her clientele. The one room, with its movable ink and dryer in the back, was crowded with men and women, mostly refugees from Rwanda ...

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