My name is Alice Njoki.  I was born in the year 2003.  My parents are small scale farmers.  I am the last of five children.  Two of my siblings work in menial jobs, one is jobless and the other attends a local university.

I started going to school in 2006 and everything seemed to be going well until 2007 when there was post-election violence in the country.  Many people died.  My family was affected by the violence and we had to relocate to Kiambu, a small town on the northern border of Nairobi.  For the next few years, I moved from one school to another.  Later I was admitted to Kolanya Girls’ High School, in Busia County located 15 miles from the Kenya-Uganda border.

Since joining this school, I have had many successes.  My first success is that God saved my life during the post-election violence and he has enabled me to continue with my studies.  God has also sustained my health and kept my parents alive.  And the greatest blessing is that he helped me score, 371 marks out of 500. No one in my family has ever scored that high before and this encourages me because I broke the record.

I have faced many challenges in school, among them is the lack of school fees.  The other challenge is that my brother has been very ill, and this distracts me in my studies.  He needs a lot of attention and therefore a lot of money must be used for his treatment.

I want to thank all the kind donors who are helping girls like me to receive a high school education.  The girls at Kolanya are very grateful for this opportunity.  May God bless you so much for your kindness.

Lastly, I would like to thank God for this far he has brought me.  God is faithful because despite all the challenges I have gone through, he has kept me on the run.  And that’s why I cannot lose hope, but I am still pressing on.  My mission is that I run to the finish line by 2020 and emerge the winner with a quality grade.  My vision is to become the solution to my own problems first, and then I can help others.