Today it happened. The last pencil, for the last test was put down. The last student stood up from her desk, exhaled and pushed her chair to its proper spot. She turned in her test, gave a knowing smile to a nodding teacher and walked out of Term 1. Completed, she took the short path from the classrooms, past the dining hall to her dorm room. Strolling past purple, orange and pink bougainvillea and under darkening thunderheads, some rumbling their personal promise of rain, this Daraja Academy student, like many of her sisters uses her solo walks on campus to reflect…

So many experiences were shuffled into her first term in high school. Just making it INTO secondary school, when it appeared that all hope was lost, arriving after days of traveling to meet girls from all parts of Kenya, girls from 13 to 17 who would become roommates and then friends and some even like sisters. She would reflect on the visitors who came from far away to meet and work with her. How Brenda from Fairfax, California taught her how to see shapes in elephants and how that eventually made sense and made drawing the animals easier. She thought of Julie from San Francisco who had not only worked on Barak Obama’s campaign tour, BUT actually MET his wife Michelle.

Entering her dorm room and dropping the backpack she’d been given when she arrived in February, which now was now bursting with papers, and text books at the foot of her bunk bead she placed her two hands flat on her desk and looked in the mirror. Like every other student on campus it was a day of reflection. She was contemplating everything that she’d done over the past two months. She was amazed how well she did in certain subjects, how much easier it was to learn in smaller classrooms, and was equally disappointed at some of her results. She knew her math grade would come up in term two no matter what!

She thought hard. She was Daraja Academy; far better than she thought she was, and less than she can one day be. She and her 25 classmates are Daraja Academy. Walking through Nanyuki town, boarding buses to Nairobi, Makindu, Kisi and beyond, wearing her light blue and dark grey Daraja Academy uniform she is no longer just Nasibo, no longer is she just faith or Mwikali. She IS the growing, powerful woman AND she is also part of something much bigger, she is part of a family, a sisterhood who cares about her future and love her, not because of the woman she can be, but because of the one she is.