TW: Childhood sexual abuse, sexual violence
A few months ago, I sat down with Lydia, whose work at Freely in Hope centres on something deceptively simple to say and profoundly hard to do: helping survivors of sexual violence heal, lead, and build a world where fewer people ever need that healing at all.
When I asked her what gives her life meaning, she didn't hesitate. Her six-year-old daughter, first. And then the work — creating a platform for survivors to become leaders, built on the very things she once struggled with herself.
"I envision a world free of any sort of violence," she told me. It's the kind of sentence that could sound naive coming from someone else. From Lydia, it doesn't. It sounds earned.
Kibera, and the things people get used to
Lydia was born and raised in Kibera, one of the largest informal settlements in Africa. She talks about growing up there with a clear-eyed honesty— not just the poverty and systemic inequality, but the domestic violence that ran through her own family and community. Women's screams at night had become so normalised that people simply learned to sleep through them.
And yet, alongside that, she remembers a fierce sense of community. Women who, despite everything they were carrying, found joy in the smallest things — a shared cup of chai, borrowed salt, a handful of maize passed over a fence. Joy, practised on purpose, right alongside hardship.
Lydia was sexually abused at five years old. She didn't have language for what had happened — she just knew, somewhere deep down, that it was wrong. There was no one to tell. Conversations about bodies, boundaries, and abuse simply didn't happen in her community. So she carried it, quietly, the way so many children do.
An opportunity born out of frustration
Lydia is one of eight children. Her father, like many fathers in Kibera, initially invested his hope and his fees in educating his sons — the belief being that girls would marry and leave, so why spend money on their schooling? But when her brothers struggled and resisted school, it opened an unexpected door for Lydia and her sister. They excelled. They came out top of their class. And slowly, her father's scepticism gave way to pride.
It's a familiar, quietly infuriating story — that girls so often have to prove themselves through the failures of others to be seen as worth investing in. Lydia didn’t dwell on the injustice of it. She just kept going—through primary school, into local high schools in Kibera without labs or equipment, still hungry to learn.
It was in high school that everything shifted. One of her closest friends was gang-raped. And in helping her friend navigate the aftermath — the shame, the infections, the confusion about what to do next — Lydia's own buried memories began to surface. She still didn't tell her friend what had happened to her. She was, in her words, "battling with figuring out whether this was true or not." What she did do was start a girls' club. It began with six members and grew to sixteen, then spread across the school — a space to talk about everything from alcoholism to abuse to poverty. It didn't fix things, but having each other made it more bearable.
Finding Freely in Hope
After high school, Lydia volunteered with two organisations — one focused on general community work, the other on menstrual health. Both were meaningful, but neither matched the thing she kept circling back to: sexual abuse, and the total absence of infrastructure to respond to it. Eventually, someone told her about an organisation offering academic scholarships to survivors of sexual abuse.
Until that point, Lydia had never called herself a survivor. Applying for the scholarship meant naming it, in writing, for the first time. She was called in for an interview — and that's where she met Nikole, the founder of Freely in Hope.
"I feel like for the first time someone paid attention to my experiences," Lydia told me. "Someone heard me, someone saw me... beyond the little girl from the hood."
She was accepted, and went on to pursue a degree in Gender Development and Women's Studies. But partway through, she told Nikole she wanted to step back from full-time study — she felt she was losing touch with her community, and wanted to intern instead. Nikole listened and designed a fellowship around Lydia so she could do both.
A holistic model, built from lived experience
What began as a scholarship programme has grown into something much larger. Every scholar at Freely in Hope has access to in-house counselling, safe housing (if they need to be removed from an abusive home), healthcare, and legal support to follow through on reporting. But Lydia was clear that the most important piece is something less tangible—a community of belonging. Knowing you're not alone, and that your voice can go on to help someone else.
From there came child protection— programmes for children, caregivers, and practitioners. This grew directly out of Lydia's own story and her children's book, Pendo's Power, written after she became a mother herself, terrified of her daughter facing the same vulnerabilities she once did. The book teaches children that their voice is their power — that if someone makes them uncomfortable, they can speak up, and someone will believe them.
The response to the book surprised her. Parents wanted to know how to actually have these conversations, so a companion guide followed, then workshops for parents and caregivers on how to build trust and respond well to disclosures (Lydia's best friend, when she first told her own father she'd been raped, was met with disbelief and blame), and separately, for teachers and practitioners on building protective policies in schools.
Then there's the Malkia programme — a nine-month, survivor-led initiative supporting women working in prostitution. Participants get counselling, education on sexual and reproductive rights, and practical skills training in things like soap-making, baking, and beading, alongside seed capital to start small businesses. Lydia was candid about how the programme starts: often with something as small as a bucket of unga as an incentive to get women into the classroom instead of the streets. But a few sessions in, something shifts. Four cohorts have graduated so far — the most recent, ten women just the Saturday before we connected.
Survivors leading survivors
What struck me most was learning that 88% of Freely in Hope's staff are themselves survivors who've come through its programmes. Lydia traced a few threads for me. Mary Claire, who came through the scholarship programme and later helped start Malkia. Pauline, who joined her to lead the first cohort in 2017. Sarafina, a participant in that first cohort who is now the Malkia programme coordinator. Mercy, whom Sarafina identified and mentored in a later cohort, and who now works there too.
"That's why it's so powerful to work with survivors," Lydia said. "They were there. They experienced the system failures. They know what the solutions should look like." It's why she insists on calling the women she works with leaders, not beneficiaries.
What she'd tell her sixteen-year-old friend now
I asked Lydia what she'd say, knowing everything she knows now, to the friend who came to her all those years ago… and her words had me struggling to hold back tears.
I believe you. You're not alone. I'm with you, and I'm going to walk with you. It was not your fault. The shame is not yours to carry. You're worthy of love and safety and community — and I'm going to be that for you.
Sitting with people in their pain until they believe they're worthy of more is, by her own admission, exhausting work. So Lydia has built rhythms to sustain herself — therapy, which every staff member has access to; a monthly mental health day to simply rest; nature walks at Karura and the Nairobi Safari Walk; a week-long organisational mental health break each May, on top of regular leave. Community, too — her sisters, her friends, people she can call. And prayer.
I left our conversation thinking about how rare it is to meet someone who has turned her own unspeakable experience into infrastructure — literal counsellors, safe houses, curricula, cohorts — for other people's healing. Lydia didn't just survive what happened to her. She built a way for others to survive it better, and to lead once they have.
Interested to find out more about Freely in Hope? Reach out to Lydia:
Lydia Matioli
Senior Director of Program Strategy
Freely in Hope - Kenya
lydia@freelyinhope.org
