How can a California girl turn into an African warrior princess? 27-year-old Mindy Budgor can tell you exactly how, having become the first female warrior of the Maasai tribe.
In her memoir Warrior Princess: My Quest to Become the First Female Maasai Warrior, Budgor relates her experience of meeting the Maasai for the first time, as she flew to Africa for a humanitarian mission. Fascinated by the stories of the brave Maasai warriors, she then asked a chief if women could become warriors and was told "no."
Mindy Budgor admits that it made her furious. Women were not equal in status as the men of the tribe, despite being as hardy and strong as them. She decided then to challenge the status quo, returning to the US to prepare, hiring a personal trainer to help her become fit, before returning to Nairobi to a tribe willing to take her on.
Budgor then went through a month's worth of tasks that had her sleeping in the open desert on beds of leaves and twigs, practicing spear hunting and acquiring bloody blisters on her hands, and suffocating a goat to death and drinking its blood.
The California girl never once put a brush in her hair, saying that she would bathe in the same water as cows and buffalos, and for the final test she had to kill a buffalo by spearing it down.
She succeeded, becoming the first woman to challenge the Maasai gender policy. Following her footsteps are twelve Maasai girls who will undergo warrior training this year.
The Californian warrior princess has since returned to her life in the United States and currently lives in New York. She has recently run half a marathon in Canada, posting up as a status in her Facebook page: "Warrior tip: Keep Going."
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