Sandra Sahi was born in Ethiopia and grew up there. When she was young, her parents died. She had two sisters and a younger brother who was very close to her. At age twelve, she married a man in Tanzania but they were not able to stay legally together, so they had to marry each other’s half-brother. She then traveled to Nairobi, Kenya where she met a man who became her partner and later divorced her.
Sandra started working as an assistant in the office of an American doctor in Nairobi until he gave up his life and took another wife. Then, at the age of twenty-one, Sandra decided to visit Tanzania to continue her studies there. On her way, she fell in love with a girl who was working there and she eloped with him to Nairobi. Two years later, when she was twenty-one years old, she got herself legally married to a man in a Tanzanian court and moved into her husband’s home in Mombasa.
Sandra now has been married for fourteen years and has adopted three children. Her former partner’s nationality is presently unknown but she considers herself to be Tanzanian. She has maintained her own personal style as well as the traditional African way of living, which were influenced by her American mother.