Like many children, Irene Njagi Muchiri wanted to be a doctor when she grew up. But, like many children with this dream, her grades did not make the cut for medical school.
“I cried a lot,” she described her disappointment. “I worried my sister sick.”
Her older sister Winfred Njatia heard her out, then introduced the disappointed student to a mentor, who suggested an alternate field of study: lab technician.
“I took it and loved that work,” Muchiri said.
Her course of study at Kenya Polytechnic University College, which she compared to a community college in this country, was her first step toward the prestigious appointment she holds today.
Muchiri is studying and working in the lab at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, a world leader in research in plant biology. She is working on the BioCassava Plus project as part of $12.1 million in grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The project uses biogenetic technology to make cassava, a staple crop in parts of Africa and South America, more nutritious and resistant to viruses and drought.
Muchiri said, “Since we in Kenya, in Africa, are users of the product, they decided it was necessary for us, as owners of the crop, to learn how to genetically modify it to introduce nutrients and introduce genes that confer resistance to the crop, so we can go back and teach our fellow scientists back home.”
Interestingly, though Muchiri grew up on a farm, her family did not farm nor eat cassava. She grew up in the the village of Gakanja, in Kenya’s mountainous central region. The staple starch there is not cassava, which is exotic to most Americans, but rather potatoes and corn. They also kept cattle for milk.
As a child, Muchiri would plant, manure and harvest crops, cut them into pieces to eat, then package the rest for sale. She would carry the cash crops on foot to the stop on the motor road where her mother caught a truck to the nearest city, Nyeri.
“We planted crops for us to eat and also to sell in the market, so we could be able to get school fees,” Muchiri said.
Though her mother, Gladys Njatia, and her father, Isaac Njatia, were peasant farmers in the hills of central Kenya, they highly prized education for their nine children. More specifically, they believed in the importance of science education.
“When I was a little girl back home, our parents somehow felt science was the answer,” she said.
“They were peasant farmers, but they wanted us to get jobs in the future and they seemed to think science was the most important thing.”
Indeed, her parents were vigilant about their children’s grades.
“They encouraged us and watched our grades as we grew,” she said. “They asked why we failed science, why our biology grade was low. I worked hard to please my parents and developed an interest, eventually.”
This does much to explain her despair when her high school grades were not high enough to place her in a pre-medical program, and her willingness to adapt by pursuing a more vocational program as a lab technician.
Muchiri said her willingness to adapt, even to disappointment, was key to her future success as a scientist now affiliated with an elite international institution.
“I tell students to be open-minded and adjustable,” she said. “Sometimes you are told to go where God does not want you to go. Sometime, you are so much interested in an area God had not intended for you to take.”
‘I met cassava’
She credits her parents and ultimately her creator with guiding her to laboratory science, but it was her husband, Nelson Muchiri, who first introduced her to the plant that has become the subject of her research.
“I met cassava for the first time when I got married in the eastern part of Kenya where they eat cassava,” she said.
Her husband played another role in her development as a scientist on the BioCassava Plus project. She was working in HIV research when she followed her husband’s career move to Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city. There she found an opportunity to research plants with the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute.
“It was not very different, though this time I was working with plants instead of people,” she said. “Now, here I am.”
She is here alone, which is very strange for someone raised in a large extended African family.
“The first time I came, I literally cried a number of times. I was so lonely. I had never been alone in my life before,” she said.
Her husband, who came to the U.S. separately before she did, works in Delaware as a state social worker.
“As foreigners, getting jobs is not the easiest thing, so it is not easy for him to leave his work and come live with me,” she said.
“We see each other maybe once a month. It’s hard.”
Harder still, their three children – Dennis, Emma and Ian – are back home in Kenya with her sister, Leah Njatia. Many Americans are amazed that she left her young children with her sister, but it is not unusual in African families.
“To us, that is normal. We are community-based,” she said.
“When I am needed to make noise, she calls me with the kid on the phone and I make a bit of noise. If I am needed to say congratulations, she gives me a chance to do that.”
She plans to return home to join them, and to transfer all of her new knowledge to scientists in Kenya, at the end of 2012.
As of now, both of her parents are still alive, still living on and working the farm. She last visited them in December 2009. Speaking in their local language of Kikuyu, she explained her biogenetic work to improve the cassava plant farmed in the eastern region of their country, where her husband’s family lives.
“I explained what I do – in brief, of course. I told them I am improving crops, doing science, doing something I love,” Muchiri said.
“Of course, they were very proud, very excited. They seemed to think their advice for me to study science was not very bad.”
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