EDWARDS, Colorado — In Kenya, women just want to be safe.

Rebecca Lolosoli had had enough with Kenya's rape epidemic and forced marriages, the beatings, the degradation — and for no reason other than being born female.

So she created a village just for women — called “Umoja.” It means “unity” in Swahili.

It's been wonderful and terrible.

Her work on behalf of the Samburu women thrust her into the international spotlight but left her estranged from her children.

She has been working to bring clean water and basic human rights to her village, but when she visits, she needs a bodyguard. Without one, she would certainly be murdered for her women's rights work. You can die for that in her part of Kenya.

“Her life is in danger. They don't like someone upsetting the apple cart, even if they're helping themselves and their children,” said Barbara Benson, a Cordillera resident who's helping bring Lolosoli to town for an event Tuesday.

Lolosoli will be at the Cordillera post office Tuesday night to tell the story of Umoja Uaso village in Samburu, Kenya. The story is about water, women's rights and how you can help.

“This is something that is extremely important. It opens a personal vision to someone who lives a life we can only imagine,” Benson said.

Lolosoli will be selling her colorful, sophisticated beaded jewelry. The event is free. She is a regular at international women's conferences at the United Nations, around the U.S. and Europe and, most recently, at the Women of the World Summit in New York City.

She has been featured in Time magazine, O magazine and in Newsweek's 2011 edition of “150 Women Who Rock the World.”

Cordillera resident Jane Wilner was with her in Santa Fe last week at the prestigious Santa Fe International Folk Art Market. Wilner helped Lolosoli and Umoja jewelry find a featured spot in the Diane Von Furstenberg spring runway show in 2009.

Change comes slowly

Change started in 1990.

Lolosoli started asking the Kenyan government to help women. Just asking the question started everything. Other women started asking what they could do. They banded together.

“If a woman lives alone, she has no security and any man can come and rape her or beat her. So we started building Umoja Uaso to stay together and be security to each other,” she said.

Lolosoli and about 15 other women set up roadside stands to sell started traditional tribal jewelry to tourists. It took a group of 15 women and several children more than a year to build the woman's village.

Although they had a safer place to sell jewelry and live, they were far from secure. Men came to the village and beat them for what they were trying to do, even when the tourists were around, she says.

Yes, it's the 21st century, but in places like Kenya women are still property.

Yes, you can educate them but women still have to walk miles each day to fetch water.

Women cannot hold a job, have no rights, cannot get a divorce and their husbands have the right to kill them, she says.

If her husband throws her out, her parents will not take her back because she no longer has a dowry, Lolosoli says.

So she has no food, no money.

If she cannot figure out some way to survive, she and her children will die.

Some women sell illegal alcohol to make money. If they're caught they go to jail far away, leaving their children homeless and foodless in a land where there is a very real chance they'll be attacked by a crocodile or hyena or lion.

It's changing, slowly.

“We have built a school where both boys and girls attend so they interact and become educated,” she says. “We are clearing the road for the younger generation. If we don't start for ourselves, no one will start it for us.”

Staff Writer Randy Wyrick can be reached at 970-748-2935 or rwyrick@vaildaily.com.