As many of our students get older, particularly as they reach high school, they are faced with familial and social pressure to provide financial and childcare support, through whatever means necessary. Of course, becoming a hardworking contributor to their families is a worthy goal. Unfortunately, for many students coming from very broken environments with limited options, the pressure and sometimes coercive tactics used to persuade some of our teens to engage in gang activity, prostitution and other negative vices, in order to support their families or meet their basic needs is immense. With this understanding, a student's ambition to further their education in either a university, college or other skill training center is sometimes treated as overambitious, making our students desire for further education seem like an unachievable pipe dream.

At Chelezo High School, we recently had the opportunity to expose our learners to peer mentors from the Equity Bank Wings to Fly Program. Equity Bank, which is a Kenyan bank with branches across Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan, Rwanda and Tanzania started their Wings to Fly Program to sponsor brilliant students from needy backgrounds, through public Kenyan high schools and universities. As part of this program, university students seek to help students from backgrounds similar to themselves through mentorship. The Wings to Fly mentors from University of Nairobi, Kenyatta University, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology and Multimedia University took time from their busy college schedules to visit our high school and motivate our students. They talked to our students about university and what to expect. They gave study tips and ways to finish high school well. They shared their experiences and answered practical questions about how they applied for the Wings to Fly program for university and how they got into their respective universities. The peer mentors shared all about the opportunities they have taken advantage of.

This event was a special peer mentorship opportunity for our Chelezo learners to see the future.  Seeing other young people, who come from similar backgrounds to them, who are achieving their academic and life goals goes a long way in encouraging our learners. Their successful peers act as exemplars of hard work and virtue. They show our students that the hard work they put in, and their resistance to negative social pressure is worth it and serves the greater purpose in sustainably assisting their families and meeting their basic needs. The peer mentorship event held at our school provided the motivation to our students to hold themselves to a different standard than their social environment calls them to. It was an opportunity to see what could be achieved by God's grace through hard work, self-discipline and perseverance. We are thankful for this opportunity for our students.