You are the bridge to the next generation | Ndinini Kimesera Sikar

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1:50I was born and raised in New York City and have lived here almost all my life. My home today is only a couple of neighborhoods away from where I grew up, and I can't help but notice every little change in the area. The place where my sisters and I bought penny candy and Icys after school is no longer open. The small mom-and-pop auto body shop is now high-rise condos. And the building that housed the local butcher? It's a car wash. I know myself enough to realize that I'm particularly prone to nostalgia. Maybe being a New Yorker does that to you. You can't help but romanticize the way the city used to be.

2:27But I also know that there are things I want to change about the city and my neighborhood, for the benefit of myself and my neighbors. So how do I balance my desire to preserve the things that feel so special to me while making room for the new?

2:43I'm Madupa Akinola. This is TED Business, a podcast from TED. Our speaker today is community leader Danini Kimsera-Sikar. Danini tells us that there is a way to preserve the traditions of the past while also envisioning a better future. She uses her own story of growing up in a traditional Maasai village in Tanzania to illustrate how we can all serve as bridges between the old and the new.

3:14This episode is sponsored by Deal. We get it. Global hiring and payroll can be a headache. Companies like Shopify, Revolut, and Eleven Labs already scale internationally with Deal. And Airwallex, the leading AI finance platform, manages and pays over 1 ,185 employees across 16 countries. Build your global team with Deal. Visit deal.com slash TED and start expanding your business today. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs.

4:01Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC.

4:20And now, Danini Kemsera-Sikar takes the TED stage. We are standing on a bridge between one way of family life and something much different to something that relies not only on human care, but also technology to manage the many responsibilities of raising a family. My plea to all of you is to be careful and move with intention. Leaving traditions behind for the new ways can be very risky. And let me explain. See, I was raised in a Maasai village in Tanzania in a family of 38. One father, five mothers, and 32 siblings. And I can literally name them all. There is Namelok, Malia, Sam, Nanoto. I'm just kidding.

5:19I won't do that. As a kid, my first job of the day was to milk our cows and goats. It took about two hours, but we girls did it together. It also hurt my fingers, but I loved it because we sang to the cows to help them relax and give more milk. After the milking, we went for firewood. It took three hours. We girls did it together, singing on the way to the bushes, eating fruits and dancing on the pathways. Next, we went for water another three hours. The waterhole was maybe 10 kilometers away, but we girls did it together, led by our mothers who taught us how to avoid elephants and buffaloes and monkeys who were all going to the same place for the same reason.

6:20By noon, it was time to sit under the trees and learn how to do our beading. Late in the afternoon, we will see the dust kicked up by our cows coming home and the bells around their necks ringing out. My brothers and other warriors will be here soon, and that meant dinner for the whole family. While eating, we hear stories from our elders, and we sing. We sing a lot. I never wanted the day to end, but when it does, we sleep on hearts on wooden platforms covered with leather. There was no such thing as a pillow. There was fire next to our beds to keep us warm. And we had each other, six, seven, eight of us, all snuggled like puppies.

7:16It was good. Around seven years old, I was chosen randomly by the government to go for a primary school. I would not have gone on my own. In fact, the villagers try to hide kids from outsiders. They know that kids who go to school start speaking a different language, literally and figuratively. And parents are not even told where their kids are being taken. But I was picked. And then, seven years later, I was selected to attend a secondary school in the city. And my parents cried all night. My mother said, I will not survive without you. And I thought, maybe I better remain behind to save my mother.

8:09See, my father eventually gave me his blessing, so I will not have to leave the village with a curse on me. Many people have opinions about the Maasai way of life. It is not all good. There is genital cutting, there is forced marriages, and girls are not eligible for, you know, inheritance. But I was cared for, and I was needed, and I belonged. There was always a place for me. And just between us, I always felt like everyone's favorite, especially my father's. When I was 15, my family arranged for me to marry a Maasai man with many cows, lots of cows. I said no. They found another man. And I said no again.

9:08They found another husband for me. I said no for the third time. And each time there were meetings, tears, and shame. There were other emotion tools. Some offered quiet encouragement. Eventually, I left the village for the city, and now I live with my chosen husband, three children, a house, a car, a laptop, shoes, and even trousers with zippers. You see, modern families seem to value personal autonomy. While traditional families, they put more emphasis on resource sharing and collective position making. So how can we blend these two worlds? This is our challenge, mine and yours too. See, 25 years ago, I started an organization, the Maasai Women Development Organization, to give women access to education and healthcare.

10:17Here's one way we bring the old into the new. The first time I gave birth, I was with my mother, other mothers, sisters, cousins, and midwives, about 15 people. So much knowledge in the room, though my husband had to wait outside. In the city, for the second child, the hostel said two people only, and their policies were very strict, and they ignored traditional knowledge. At Muedo, we do a little bit of both. So we have clean, prepared best centers, schools that consider our culture, and trained midwives, and we also include our husbands. So the question for everyone here is, How can we integrate the best part of our childhood into the world as it changes?

11:15You see, I don't walk 10 kilometers a day anymore, and I'm not on the land with the animals from 5 a.m. to sundown anymore. I'm not hugged and held by dozens of people a day anymore. In my modern family, we decided there will be more education, there will be no genital cutting, more playing, no false marriages, but there will be more contributing, more storytelling, and there will be more listening. And all that can be done in a multigenerational setting while keeping the elders in the position of prominence. There are costs to moving on, for sure, but I am the bridge. You too are a bridge, and whether you know it or not, what you did as a child is going to sound as foreign to the next generation as the girls singing to cows sounded to you today.

12:17Well, I guess my question is, do you know what you want to preserve for the next generation? And do you know how you'll do it? You see, integration takes intention and strong leadership. So let's pause and make our list of must-haves in the new world. Let's make sure, as species, we can still sing.

13:02Thank you. Thank you.

13:28are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC. Hey, this is Elise Hu, host of TED Talks Daily. This episode is supported in part by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Hosted by Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of the best-selling book, How to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes, and everyday people about why we do the things we do.

14:14Listen to Choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen. Mod.com is changing the way people battle excessive fatigue. Ever hit a wall in the middle of the day and a third coffee just doesn't do it anymore? Here's what's actually happening. Coffee only briefly blocks adenosine, the chemical that tires you out. When it stops working, your system is flooded and you crash. Modafinil is a prescription treatment that works in a completely different way. Modafinil works by stimulating multiple receptors in the brain associated with wakefulness, including dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, histamine, glutamate, and orexin.

14:57It's a more complete solution that gives you 10 to 12 hours of steady focus and energy. To learn more, go to mod.com. Fill out your intake form, meet with a licensed provider, and if approved, Mod Alert ships straight to your door. Go to mod.com to get started. That's mod.com.

15:26That was Danini Kimsera-Sikar speaking at TED 2025. I love the nuance Danini brings to her own experience. She doesn't let the gloss of the past smooth over the rough edges of her story. She also identifies and names what was so transformative about her upbringing. The power of multi-generational wisdom, collective resource sharing, and decision making. She now harnesses those values to help provide women with the kind of comprehensive and thoughtful medical care everyone deserves. Danini's talk made me think of my own experience in my workplace. What do I want to preserve for future generations?

16:04How can I employ the wisdom passed down to me to help inform the young people I work with as a professor, from my MBA students to my PhD students to my junior colleagues? It made me think about my current relationship with AI and how it's changing my students' work. I know there are ways to use generative AI that are useful, but it also feels really important to me that we preserve the tradition of critical thinking that is so essential to higher education. I don't want students, or anyone for that matter, to reach for AI just because it's there and it's easier and more quote-unquote efficient.

16:39I want them to engage with their own questions and frustrations and mistakes the way we have in the classroom for decades. I feel like a bridge. My work engages with the next generation of thinkers and scholars. And in my personal life, I'm part of a multi-generational family with both my parents and my nieces and nephew living nearby. Danini's talk makes me feel grateful for their presence and has reminded me that next time we're together, I need to ask them what traditions they feel are important to preserve and which ones they want to do away with to make room for something new. That's part of the beauty of Danini's message.

17:14We get to decide together. That's it for today. TED Business is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced by Hannah Kingsley Ma, edited by Alejandro Salazar, and fact-checked by Julia Dickerson. Special thanks to Maria Latias, Farah DeGrange, Daniela Balarezo, Tansika Sangmanivang, and Roxanne Heilash. I'm Madupa Akinola. Thanks for listening.

17:48This episode is sponsored by Deal. We get it. Global hiring and payroll can be a headache. Companies like Shopify, Revolut, and 11 Labs already scale internationally with Deal. And Airwallix, the leading AI finance platform, manages and pays over 1 ,185 employees across 16 countries. Build your global team with Deal. Visit deal.com slash TED and start expanding your business today. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs.

18:35Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. member FDIC. Self-directed investing, trading, full-service wealth management, automated investing, financial planning, thematic investing, retirement planning. And to think, that's just a small taste of what Schwab offers. Because Schwab knows that when it comes to your finances, choice matters. No matter your goals, investing style, life stage, or experience, Schwab has everything you need all in one place. So you can invest your way. Visit schwab.com to learn more.