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Winnie Kiiru

21 quotes

“Kenyan conservation will not work unless we spend time with the people, understanding their aspirations, pain, and disappointments.”
Winnie Kiiru wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yes, they now live in New York, and we have a great relationship. Whenever I visit my children, I always get back thinking if I died today, I would go to heaven. I say this for two reasons. One, they are best friends, and they look out for each other. And, two, they spoil me and love me to bits.”
Winnie Kiiru wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yes. The children go to termite mounds and take soil off them because there’s no food at home. They eat the soil to keep the hunger pangs away. These things have made me realise that we should think of compassionate conservation, not just towards the animals but also the people. Because if we have no compassion towards the people, they will finish the wildlife.”
Winnie Kiiru wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s an uphill task and will be for a long time, but you know what? We need to start somewhere. My lightbulb moment has come, and I know for a fact we have to stop paying lip service to the people and begin understanding them. I’ll give you an example. I spend a lot of time in Amboseli and have many wazees (elders) come by my place. This one mzee comes by, and I ask him to stay and have a cup of tea as it’s raining. He tells me he can’t because the youngsters in the field forgot his goat, and he has to find it before dark.”
Winnie Kiiru wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Be kind to yourself. Life is full of ups and downs, and a lot of times, no one teaches us to be kind to ourselves. We focus on what we didn’t do, and there is a long list of these things tucked away in our minds. I have learnt to replace that list with a list of things that make me feel better. Because of all the things that you didn’t do, there are a whole lot of other things that you did do.”
Winnie Kiiru wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I was a young girl, I always wanted to be a vet, not because of loving animals, but because when the vet came to my grandmother’s, everything stopped. My grandmother would dress really beautifully, like a VIP was coming. The vet always wore in a white coat with a bag for looking after the cattle. The whole atmosphere around him was so grand and I thought, that’s who I want to be. Then I went to university and studied botany and zoology.”
Winnie Kiiru wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I did my masters at the University of Zimbabwe, which meant I had to do a whole number of units on social development, ecology, and community. They deliberately bring social thinking into the mind of a scientist. At that time, human-elephant conflict was becoming such a big issue, but none of us biologists knew how to measure the impact, deal with politics, or solve the problem. So many biologists spent all of their time studying animals and natural systems and forgetting human beings impacted those systems.”
Winnie Kiiru wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As soon as I finished my Ph.D. (in Biodiversity Management with a focus on human-elephant conflict), I knew I needed a vehicle to help me communicate my passion for human development.”
Winnie Kiiru first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: [https://jhwildlifefilm.wordpress.com/2015/10/07/discussions-with-delegates-an-interview-with-winnie-kiiru/ So at this point, it seems you had a new understanding for the importance of collaboration between environmenta…
“I don’t know the answer. It’s organic. It’s just grown on me. It’s a passion project. Another thing that bothers me a lot is that many young Kenyans don’t see Conservation as something that is authentic for them. They are clouded by the tourism industry. People who are non-Kenyans—Europeans and white conservationists—they have been so involved. If you show a conservation film, people will say, ‘Why are you watching things for white people?’”
Winnie Kiiru wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have developed a study center to bring kids for a weekend where they can tromp around. Where I live, if you take a walk in the morning, you will walk into a head of giraffe, and Mt Kilamanjaro is about 70 km away. A Kenyan child could finish a degree in wildlife ecology without ever having been in a national park without being controlled by teachers. This program allows them basically to do whatever they like. Some might do a vegetation survey, anything. I don’t care what they do, and I don’t care about the results. I just want them to experience the wild.”
Winnie Kiiru wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m convinced that the Maasai way of life is great, and I’m also convinced that certain aspects of their culture cannot respond to life as it is. For instance, keeping 50% of the population off the table in terms of discussing what goes on with their lives. Why aren’t the women participating, excluded from any formal trading, they don’t go to the market, excluded from meetings, but they are the ones who are interacting first hand with the land and the children.”
Winnie Kiiru wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think what makes me proud is that I have remained an authentic African woman. I’ve had great privileges, a great education – not very many people in Africa have a Ph.D., and not enough people in Africa really spend enough time looking at the outdoors. I have done this, and still, I have two children that I love dearly and are very successful. I have a home, and I interact very comfortably with my family and with the world.”
Winnie Kiiru wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I feel very happy that I can go home and visit the village and be welcome. I can go to the Clinton Global Initiative and sit at the round table with Hilary Clinton, or I can sit on the ground and drink tea with the Maasai women. I don’t feel small with Hilary and I don’t feel large with the Maasai women. So I’m here in Jackson Hole talking about conservation, interacting with the best in the world and really watching cutting edge technology and its far from home and my reality, and yet I don’t feel lost”
Winnie Kiiru wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s very male dominated in my country. I have to always walk the fine line between when I’m trying to change something to not be relegated to having “empty female passion.” I’m a very intelligent woman and I cannot have my views trashed on the basis of being emotional.”
Winnie Kiiru wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[With] my son, maybe. Maybe the next generation. It’s changing slowly, but… there’s hope. [It starts with] the generation of boys brought up by strong mothers. My son dates a woman that went to Yale. He just lets her do whatever. Who asked him?”
Winnie Kiiru wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a child, I was always asked to speak on behalf of others. Maybe this was a result of being the firstborn.My mother had me before she got married; my siblings were born when I was around six years old. I never had the luxury of being childish. I learnt that unless I spoke up, and very quickly, I would bear the brunt of my younger siblings’ mistakes. I later realised that I had the gift of communicating, not just my thoughts, but those of other people as well.It was high school that crushed me.I realised there was a way I “needed” to look to be accepted. My skin needed to be lighter, my hair longer. My schoolmates told me I had knocked knees, something I hadn’t previously considered. I got a lot of mean comments. But then again, I gave as good as I got. That being said, at the end of high school, I didn’t get the grades to do anything I wanted. I had lost my voice.”
Winnie Kiiru wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I thought maybe I’d have made a great lawyer.I went to university kicking and screaming because, first of all, I had to go to the National Youth Service, which was brutal. Secondly, I was going to train to be a teacher. I never wanted to be a teacher.As soon as I completed my university degree, I got married. I didn’t have the confidence of my earlier years, so I didn’t choose, I was chosen. It makes me a little sad because I saw what was happening around me, but I didn’t have a voice. What I did have was resilience, the ability to stick it out. It was when I started working in conservation that I started finding my voice again. Staying in the bush for extended periods gave me a new sense of freedom. I found the thrill that I’d been missing through high school, through university, and into marriage. And that continued as I went to study for my master’s degree.”
Winnie Kiiru wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was just doing life, and when I found myself in a space that energised me, I immersed myself in it. My journey in conservation has been my greatest gift because it opened up a whole world that I would wish for any woman. I’ve had a privileged life in that way. When I completed my master’s degree, I got a job at Kenya Wildlife Service. With time, I got a bit disillusioned with this job and decided to shift gears into the world of multilevel marketing. I was using a different energy in this space, and while I excelled at what I did, I started to feel a little insecure again.I finally found my way back into conservation through a job with the Born Free Foundation. It gave me a lot of opportunities to travel and speak. I would give talks at fundraising events with serious heavy hitters, and in that process, it occurred to me that I was good at this. It built up my confidence.My job didn’t pay a lot, but it gave me a lot of exposure. At some point, I decided to leave my job and go to write my PhD. I applied to Kenyan universities but didn’t get accepted. Then I spoke at an event at the Royal Geographic Society in London. Afterwards, a couple in the audience followed me and asked how much money I needed to put more research into the address I had given. I told them, and they wrote a cheque to fund my research. They asked for nothing in return. I ended up doing my PhD at the University of Kent with additional support from Born Free Foundation. Going for my PhD was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done. I see this as a time when I gained a doctorate but lost everything.”
Winnie Kiiru wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I came back, I had to go back to the drawing board. Once again, my confidence was shattered.I have two boys who I lost in a sense because of my long absence from home. I had to ask my long-term house-help to leave at some point, and my younger son was not happy about this. His reaction made me feel like I had been replaced. That hurt like hell. My eldest son had done his A levels in South Africa and was going to university in the US. My absence had resulted in his lacking confidence. It took a lot of work to rebuild, in my children, the assurance that I was still their mother, who loved them unconditionally and cared that they succeeded.”
Winnie Kiiru wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What has made me who I am is that I dared to take this academic journey. The only thing that I would do differently would be to get insights from people who had done the same thing. That way, I may have been a lot less surprised at the end of my experience.I had illusions that once I finished my PhD, I would automatically get a job. This wasn’t the case. I taught at the university for three years without pay. During this period, I underwent some severe PhD poverty, as some called it. My financial situation was so dire that I had to borrow money to buy a ticket to get to my graduation. I had no idea how my home situation would change and how my children would be affected. Writing a PhD takes a lot, and you have to put other commitments on the back burner for a while. In the meantime, life goes on. Some people in your life will become resentful, some will be understanding, and some will be helpless.”
Winnie Kiiru wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“100 per cent. The other day on my Twitter feed, there was a story of how one elephant, Ella, got killed. This is very sad. I commented that we need to create a harmonious existence between wildlife and people, and somebody asked, “When will we start culling the people?” This really shocked me. What kind of person would suggest killing Africans as a solution to the human-wildlife conflict? Sadly, this is not a unique sentiment. Our colonial histories determine the conservation ethic in Kenya and Africa. The existing success stories have colonial roots so there seems to be no reason to change the narrative.”
Winnie Kiiru wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source