Sara's journey: from post-election displacement to civil engineering
Sara was nine years old when post-election violence emptied her village in the Rift Valley. Thirteen years later she graduated top of her civil-engineering cohort at JKUAT. This is the long arc between those two points — and the people who held it together.
When the family arrived at the Eldoret IDP camp in January 2008, Sara's mother had two children, one bag, and no idea where her husband was. They lived in the camp for fourteen months. Sara missed two school years.
A second chance, then a third
An Agano field officer found Sara in 2010 through a partner church running mobile literacy classes at the resettlement site. She entered our girls' bridging programme at age twelve, two grade levels behind her age cohort. It took her eighteen months to close the gap.
Her sponsor — a retired schoolteacher in Toronto — wrote to her every month for the next eleven years. Sara still keeps the letters in a shoebox under her bed in Nairobi.
"I did not know what an engineer was until I was sixteen. By seventeen I knew it was what I would be. My sponsor's letters were the first time anyone outside my family told me I was clever."
— Sara Chelangat, civil engineer
What she's building now
Sara works for a Kenyan firm designing low-cost rural footbridges — the kind that turn a four-hour walk to school into a forty-minute one. Her first project, a 38-metre cable footbridge in West Pokot, opened in March 2026. Two hundred and twelve children now cross it every weekday.
Naomi Wekesa
Field officer, Eldoret
