Name: Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton '91, M’94
Major: Economics and government double major
Profession: Teacher, community development advocate in Kenya
Home: McLean, VA

The only one in his family to go to school, Joseph Lekuton left his native land for the first time when he traveled to St. Lawrence. Now a teacher at The Langley School in northern Virginia, he remains actively involved in community development projects in rural Kenya. Through his work with several non-profit organizations, he has provided more than 100 nomadic children with education scholarships and constructed a water system delivering clean water to a dozen villages in northern Kenya. He is the youngest recipient of Kenya 's Order of the Grand Warrior, given by the president for exemplary service to the country. He returns to Kenya every summer, where he lives as the Maasai tribesman that he was raised to become.  

National Geographic is the publisher of a short, heartfelt memoir by Lekuton. Facing the Lion: Growing Up Maasai on the African Savanna is a book of cultural encounters as he recounts growing up in a traditional nomadic way of life in Kenya (where “facing the lion” is both a metaphor and a vivid memory). Torn between two ways of life, he learns to accommodate both of them. Along the way he celebrates his tribal initiation by circumcision, learns to play soccer and speak English, gets help when drought causes his family to have too few cattle to pay his school bills, and adapts to being a college student halfway around the world, in a physical and cultural climate unlike any he'd known before.