Susan Anyango: the girl who argued her way to law school

When Susan Anyango was in Form One, the biggest threat to her education was not a difficult exam. It was an envelope: the school fees letter that arrived each term and quietly decided who stayed in class and who went home. Susan stayed. A Siaya Project sponsor, a person she had never met, covered the fees that her family could not. "The financial support that Siaya Project provided was truly life-changing," she says. But money was only the first gift. The second was the expectation that came with it: show up, work hard, and one day do the same for someone else. She found her voice in debate club, where an argument was the one thing that cost nothing to own. Teachers noticed. Mentors from the holiday programme pushed her towards law, a course most of her classmates thought was reserved for children from Nairobi. Today Susan wears the black gown of a law graduate. She wants to work on land and family disputes in Siaya County, the same cases that pulled neighbours apart in her childhood. "Someone paid for my school fees before they knew my name," she says. "That is the kind of lawyer I want to be for other people."