You are the bridge to the next generation | Ndinini Kimesera Sikar (Kelly Corrigan takeover)
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You are listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm Kelly Corrigan. I'm a writer. I'm a podcaster. I'm a TED Talker. And I am taking over for Elise Hu this week for a special series on AI and family life. I guest curated a session about this topic at TED 2025, and I'm here now to share these very special talks with you, along with a lot of behind the scenes recordings and personal insights to shed some light on the process of how these talks came to life. So in February, 2024, a couple months before I gave my own Ted talk, I went to Tanzania with Christie Turlington Burns, who has an organization called Every Mother Counts, which is working to reduce maternal mortality around the world, including here in the United States.
And as part of that trip, we went to a Maasai village and we met this woman. So 25 years ago, Danini Kimsera Sikar founded the Maasai Women Development Organization to help Maasai girls stay safe and get a great education and pick their own husbands. And then, as they became Maasai women, helped them start small businesses and manage their money and buy land. Danini is also one of those rare people who has the respect of both government officials and village elders, artisans and policymakers. So when I first went to the Maasai village, we were being presented with their way of life. And to be totally honest, my reaction was pity. I felt sorry for the women who were one of many wives. I thought this seems so hard.
I don't think I would like it at all. I think I prefer the way that modern life goes. But even just over the hour and a half that we spent listening to their stories, I started to rethink my initial reaction. I started to see that in this community, no one ever gets lost. And it got me thinking, what is progress? Is it this monochromatic step forward where every bit of it is to the good? Or is it more of a mixed bag? Because at this moment, when AI seems to be surrounding us and ready to come in any door or window we happen to leave open, we should know what world we're leaving behind and what world we're choosing to enter. And we should do that carefully. So my experience of absorbing the truth of this very old Maasai culture, for better or worse, and what modern life has improved upon and maybe what parts of modern life are a terrible degradation of what was, of how this woman grew up, made me want Nini to come to TED and just tell the story of her childhood versus the way she's raising her own children now in the city.
She had the power to decide, live as I was raised or live in a new modern way. And she had to work hard to figure out what would be lost if she stepped forward into non-traditional individualistic living. And then she activated her own great agency to see what parts of her childhood she could somehow replicate in the very modern world where she finds herself living now. And that is a challenge to all of us. So ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Danini Kimsera Sikar.
Hi, everyone. We are standing on a bridge between one way of family life and something much different, to something that relies not only on human care but also technology to manage the many responsibilities of raising a family. My plea to all of you is to be careful and move with intention. leaving traditions behind for the new ways can be very risky. And let me explain. See, I was raised in a Maasai village in Tanzania, in a family of 38. One father, five mothers and 32 siblings. And I can literally name them all. There's Namilok, Malia, Sam, Nanoto. I'm just kidding, I won't do that. As a kid, my first job of the day was to milk our cows and goats. It took about two hours, but we girls did it together.
It also hurt my fingers, but I loved it, because we sang to the cows to help them relax and give more milk. After the milking, We went for firewood. It took three hours. We girls did it together, singing on the way to the bushes, eating fruits and dancing on the pathways. Next, we went for water.
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