“There’s been a lot of security challenges”

KENYA - On a hot afternoon at a sprawling settlement on the outskirts of Mombasa, Phyllis Omido makes her rounds.

For close to a decade, Omido has been visiting the Owino Uhuru village, monitoring the various illnesses, deaths, and miscarriages that have occurred since a nearby smelter contaminated the village’s air and water with lead.

She passes through the rows of small, mud-walled homes that make up this densely packed village and pokes her head through the doorway of her first visit: Catherine Okello, a small, sickly 35-year-old woman. “Somehow, Catherine’s whole family was exposed to very high lead levels,” Omido says of the ailing mother. “I haven’t understood why, because they weren’t the ones living closest to the lead factory.”

Before driving Okello to the hospital, Omido visits two other ailing villagers: Robert Osieko, an elderly man who recently suffered a stroke, and David Mahala, a middleaged man whose kidneys are failing. Omido takes Okello to the hospital and stays with her until she’s admitted. She then drives an hour north to a small coastal city, arriving at a walled compound where she’s taken refuge since November. She’s hiding here, she says, while a lawsuit she filed against the Kenyan government and the smelter owners works its way through the court system.

She undoes the three locks on her front door and disarms the security system, setting down her purse, which houses a small black GPS tracker resembling a beeper; she carries it with her wherever she goes. “There’s been a lot of security challenges,” she would later say. “Any time we go to court, we come under attack.” Omido, 39, is one of Kenya’s most outspoken environmental activists. She’s been dubbed the ‘East African Erin Brockovich’ and her work has led to the shuttering of ten toxic waste smelters in Kenya in the past three years. She received the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize, awarded annually to six people from six different continents who undertake “sustained and significant efforts to protect and enhance the natural environment, often at great personal risk.” Indeed, much of Omido’s work has been at great risk - to herself, her family, and her colleagues’ families. She’s been physically attacked multiple times and is constantly threatened. She says she’s been arrested on five different occasions, but never convicted. Her colleagues’ lives have also been threatened, their homes broken into or burned.

(CNN)