Salome is a qualified Trade Mark and Patent Paralegal. She grew up in Nairobi in Kenya, but for the last 17 years has been working in our Dubai office.
If ‘home is where the heart is’, and it’s an expression that has been around for a very long time, Salome now has two homes. She has been living with her family in Dubai, and working there, for just over 17 years, and her two daughters were born there. So Dubai is certainly home. But Nairobi, the capital of Kenya in East Africa, is where she grew up and where both her and her husband’s extended family still is. It’s also the place for which she has the deepest affection and to which she is most deeply attached. It very definitely remains home for her.
In recent years, the number of Kenyans moving abroad to work has increased dramatically. Typically, like Salome, they do well professionally and successfully raise families in their adopted country, but remain inextricably linked to their homeland. Perhaps one of the main reasons for this is the fact that in Kenya family is all-important – and family means extended family including grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. It’s a very communal culture; the roots go deep.
As was common at the time, Salome’s mother married very young. It was an arranged marriage and her family was paid a bride price. She and her husband had four children, but ultimately the marriage didn’t work out well and she returned to live with her parents in Nairobi. That meant that Salome grew up in a big family – as well as her mother and siblings, there were grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and lots of family friends. It was a rich and loving environment, and one she was keen that her own daughters should experience. Her mother worked in a government department until she took early retirement and bought a piece of land in her family’s village where she now lives and farms, growing tea and coffee trees.
She was always concerned that her children should be well educated; she guided them, but left their choice of career entirely up to them. Salome’s eldest sister was a teacher, her brother studied accounting and her younger sister mass communication, but both ended up in the world of business. From very early on, Salome loved books. In primary school there was a library that was not well kept and she liked nothing better than to spend time helping the teacher put the books into order. So it wasn’t surprising that when the time came to go to college, she decided to study for a Diploma of Library and Information Science. Her first jobs were working as a librarian with NGOs in Nairobi.
In 2006 she married Kenneth. He was an accountant by profession and had obtained a position in Dubai, so she followed him there. At the time, it was very difficult to obtain a library position there, so she applied for anything appropriate that came up. And what came up was an administrative position at Rouse. She took it happily and over time qualified as a paralegal. At the outset, she didn’t know anything about Intellectual Property, but as she didn’t have children she was able to spend her time to finding out. She did several WIPO courses and eventually the CIPA and CITMA paralegal courses, qualifying as a patent and trade mark paralegal.
Salome’s two daughters, Ashley and Melanie, now 16 and 14, have grown up in Dubai, a very different upbringing from hers, but positive in many respects. They have been introduced to a range of cultures, had a very good education, and are likely to go on to further study elsewhere: Ashley, analytical with an interest in psychology, wants to be involved in criminal investigation; while Melainie, inspired by what she has seen at family events at Rouse, wants to be a lawyer. Salome has, however, always wanted to make sure that they do not miss out entirely on the richness of the upbringing she had growing up in Nairobi, or on Kenyan life in general. So each December, along with many other Kenyan expats, they all return to Kenya and their extended family and friends there. The girls love it. They love the variety; the sense of freedom being surrounded by family. Salome has also been careful to introduce them to aspects of society that they don’t see in Dubai; for example, in Dubai they never see poverty, or people who are homeless. In Nairobi, she makes a point of taking them to children’s homes so that they can see children who do not have parents and whose start in life has not been as easy as theirs has been. It is a hugely enriching experience for them.
These days, Salome can’t really indulge her passion for books – between work and family, she doesn’t have a lot of spare time – but when she does read, it will usually be a Christian book. Religion is, and has always been, an important part of her life, as it is for her mother and both her grandparents. It is the motivation for ensuring that her daughters are aware of those in need and ready to help where they can.
While for the moment, the family is happy at home in Dubai, the aim is eventually to return to Kenya. Salome’s ambition is to follow in her mother’s footsteps: buy a piece of land in the village and farm there on her retirement. She will be returning home – and also creating a place her daughters will always feel is home, wherever in the world they might be.