An exciting and glorious day

For Anna Ntaiya, that day in May was the most exciting and glorious day in her life. The Masai woman had travelled from Kenya all the way to the United States to witness the graduation ceremony of her daughter - an educational triumph that far eclipsed anything ever achieved by a woman from her village. Amy Argetsinger recounts Anna's journey

Anna Ntaiya stumbled on the moonlit road as she raced for the late-night bus to Nairobi.

She already was 20 miles from Enoosaen, her village in western Kenya with no running water or paved roads, a place where cattle outnumbered people. There, she always stepped surely, in the muck of her barnyard or on the rocky path to the market, in sandals or barefooted.

But at the bus stop in Kilgoris, the town where the paved road begins, she was wearing a kind of shoe she had never worn before. Dark shoes, with a strap and a buckle and a hint of a heel. Shoes she had been given for her journey to the United States.

And so she struggled to gain her balance and climbed aboard. Torrents of rain had fallen all week across Kenya, and the bus convulsed every few seconds as it hit another pock on the 300 miles of highway to the capital.

Ntaiya would sleep little that night. She expected to sleep less the next one, on the flights from Nairobi to London to Washington. This was the path her eldest child had travelled more than four years earlier in pursuit of a degree from an American university, an ambition their neighbours had once mocked as folly. Now it was Ntaiya's duty to travel the path as well.

It was May and more than a million students were set to graduate from colleges across the United States, and for most who embrace the ritual of cap and gown, a parent or two will travel to witness it.

Usually, it requires a couple of hours on the move - usually by car, sometimes by air - and a dent in the chequebook, all made worthwhile for the chance to bask in the glow of a child's accomplishment.

For Anna Ntaiya, 43, the trip to her daughter Kakenya's graduation from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, required months of deliberation and weeks of preparation and prayer. She had to leave her struggling farm and her six children still at home for more than two weeks.

And she endured 60 hours of nearly nonstop travel from Enoosaen into what would seem like a different century altogether - from a culture where no one owns a refrigerator or a television to one where everyone seemed to have a cellphone and a car.

Anna, a dryly pragmatic woman, said she was going to the United States for three reasons: to see the daughter she had borne at 17, to witness an educational triumph that far eclipsed anything ever achieved by a woman from Enoosaen, and to personally thank the many Americans who had made it possible.

"I have a lot of work to do," she said.

Like the buckled dress shoes, the trip had been a gift. Never could she have afforded it on her own, the $1,300 round-trip plane ticket alone costing more than what her cows and cornfields might gross in a good year. And this had not been a good year. There had been a drought and floods, and hyaenas devoured one of her cows and its calf.

Some Americans had decided to sponsor Ntaiya's trip to Lynchburg - people whose names she did not even know, supporters of Kakenya's college who had heard the story of the young Masai woman who was the first girl from her rural community to seek a university degree.

And so the suitcase trembling on the bus rack above her seat was stuffed with tributes to the sponsors' generosity: a bracelet hand-beaded in the pattern of the Kenyan flag, a horsetail switch used in tribal ceremonies to administer blessings, a long skirt embroidered with medallions and tiny beads, gifts she intended to deliver as thanks.

For the college president who had given Kakenya a scholarship, Anna packed a bracelet on which one of her sisters-in-law had beaded the woman's name. There was also a four-kilo bag of millet in her suitcase as a favour to a friend whose sister in Delaware was pining for such stuff.

But most essential was the dress for Kakenya. Red, close-fitting with a beaded neckline, it was the height of Masai elegance, and Anna hoped her daughter could wear it at the graduation ceremony. It had taken her a week to sew.

"Is Kakenya huge?" Anna asked in the English she had been practicing. Kakenya hadn't been home in 2-1/2 years. There was no post office in Enoosaen, so their letters took months to arrive, and there were no phone lines to enable them to talk, so there were many things she just couldn't know about her daughter anymore.

"I just imagined the size," Anna said. "I don't know if I will still remember her. I just imagined."

The bus was speeding now, trying to make up for a four-hour delay. Now and then it would stop in a featureless dark town and rowdy young men would board, their bags clogging the narrow aisle and their laughter roiling the night.

But she had a companion. The male elders of Enoosaen had selected one for her after the sponsors agreed to pay for a second ticket.

Noonkuta Nangeya, a handsome woman with honey-coloured eyes and a pair of beaded cuffs in each of her stretched earlobes, was married to a half-brother of Ntaiya's late husband. While Anna was fluent in Swahili and capable in English, Nangeya spoke only Maa, the language unique to the Masai.

At 48, she had never travelled more than 20 miles from Enoosaen or left her seven children, the youngest of whom was two, for more than a day. Now here she was in the seat next to Ntaiya, heading to the United States.

"It's a difficult thing," Nangeya acknowledged through a translator. "I know I'm going, but what to expect?"

In the eyes of their community, the journey was an epic event. A week earlier, Anna spent the night with her fellow church members on top of a mountain, fasting and praying for her safety. A couple of days later, the congregation returned to her home and prayed and sang and blessed both women again.

And the day before the pair climbed on the bus, more than 60 neighbours showed up at Anna 's three-room mud-walled house to wish them well. They each received a plate of hot food and lingered for hours chatting in Ntaiya's front yard, the goats and the chickens squabbling for scraps.

What to make of such an adventure? Some harboured concerns. "We are mixed up" about her journey, confided her pastor, the Rev. John Sancha. "The plane, you know."

Anna's oldest son, 18-year-old Benard, said his mother was perhaps a little fearful but mostly excited about her trip.

"Maybe she will like it there," he speculated. "She will want to stay."

Impossible, declared Anna. "I have my children," she said. There was 4-year-old Nashipai and 8-year-old Seenoi, still impish little girls, and quiet 13-year-old mother's-helper Noomali, and lanky 16-year-old Daniel, still at home and in school like Benard. And there was 3-month-old Leshoo, the son that vivacious 21-year-old Naserian had.

But neither would she acknowledge any fears about leaving them for two weeks. God, she asserted again and again, would protect her.

She had shown no fear when the crowded pickup truck in which she and Nangeya had begun an earlier err