IRENE CHEBET
Irene Cheruto was thirteen years old when she gave birth to her first child, alone, at home, with no one trained to help her. She remembers the fear more than the pain; the sense that something was going terribly wrong and that no one was coming to save her. She nearly lost her life that day. That moment has never left her, and it is the reason she now dreams of becoming a midwife.
Irene is the fourth of five children from Kasei, West Pokot. She recalls just wanting to go to school, but her father sent her brother to school and kept her home to look after the livestock. When she was twelve, she was married off as a second wife. One moment she was a child. The next, she was expected to run a household, bear children, and carry burdens she didn’t yet have the strength for.
Her days blurred into fetching water, tending the farm, and searching for food, usually with a baby strapped to her back. There was no rest, and no one asked how she was. Once, while gathering firewood on a hillside, she grew so dizzy and weak that she had to stop and sit until the world stopped spinning. What hurt more than the exhaustion was watching girls her own age walked to school, laughing, dreaming of becoming teachers and doctors. She wanted that too. She just didn’t know how to reach it.
She never fully let go of hope. With two friends, she started a small beadwork business, making bracelets and necklaces, the profits rotating between them like a merry-go-round. She dreamed of building a mabati house to replace the grass-thatched one she lived in. When she told her husband, he reminded her that everything, including her, belonged to him because he had paid dowry for her. That was the moment she understood exactly how little control she had over her life. At that moment she decided it would not stay that way. So she ran away.
She left for her sister’s home in Makutano,West Pokot leaving her children behind with their grandmother. Walking away from them remains one of the most painful things she has ever done, but she knew that staying meant nothing would ever change; for her or for them. She begged her sister to let her stay so she could go back to school. With her sister’s support and the help of a kind headteacher, she was taken to a rescue center in Morpus, West Pokot where, for the first time in years, she was safe enough to learn again.
Returning to school as an older student, carrying experiences her classmates couldn’t imagine, was not easy. But she refused to waste the chance she’d fought so hard for. She worked hard, sat her Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE), and moved on to secondary school. People believed in her along the way; Madam Caroline, the Executive Director at Perur Rays of Hope, pushed her forward on the days she wanted to stop.
At the HER Lab in West Pokot, Irene chose to study electrical installation, a course she was told was “for men” and “too difficult” for someone like her. She kept asking herself: if men can do it, why can’t she? A year later, she graduated and is currently completing her industrial attachment. She can wire a house, install solar panels and alarms, and set up motors for pumping water and running posho mills. She also learned computer skills she knows will open doors she hasn’t even found yet.
But the real change happened somewhere quieter than in the classroom. Through safeguarding support and sessions with the HER Lab counsellor, Lillian, she learned how to hold herself together on the hardest days, especially when news came about her children’s health and the distance between them felt unbearable.
HER Lab also gave her something she had never had before: sisterhood. Her best friend, Ruth, comes from a background similar to hers, so she understands things Irene doesn’t even have to explain. When one of them feels like giving up, the other reminds her: their lives are already changing, and what’s ahead is better than what they left behind.
In a podcast conversation with fellow graduates, Irene spoke about what dignity means to her: being valued regardless of where you come from, and making room for other women to step into spaces the world has told them don’t belong to them. Fields like electrical work. Rooms like this one.
In her free time, Irene still makes bracelets and necklaces from beads, the same quiet craft that once helped her survive. Now she teaches it to other women in her community, so they can build something of their own.
Irene describes what HER Lab is to her as a rebirth. It gave her a second chance at a life she thought had already been decided for her. Her voice, once silenced before she even knew she had one, now carries strength and tells of a future for herself and her children that she intends to keep. “My children’s future will not look like mine. They will go to school and grow up choosing their paths. Whatever cycle held my family for generations ends with me,” she says exuding confidence and hope.