A Nine-Year Journey of Growth, Friendship, and Shared Strength
Eunice Yarasia spent a year watching her friends leave for college while she stayed behind. Her dream of studying medicine had ended with a single rejected application, and with it, the future she had spent years imagining. “Disappointed, I stayed at home for a year, watching my friends leave for college while I felt my life was lagging,” she recalls. “I was miserable and had lost hope. I didn’t know whether I would have continued with my education after high school.”
She had already survived one closed door. Eunice had completed high school in 2015 and joined the Morpus Rescue Centre in West Pokot to escape Female Genital Mutilation and forced marriage. The centre, which is today Perur Rays of Hope, would partner with Global Give Back Circle to offer HER Lab program. It gave her a haven through mentorship and skills training in computer and beadwork. But surviving one threat didn’t guarantee a future, and by the time her college plans to study medicine fell through, that future felt as uncertain as ever.
It was around this time that a dinner conversation nearly four thousand miles away would change the course of her life. In 2017, Margo Day, then Vice President of U.S. Education at Microsoft and a mentor with the Global Give Back Circle, had just returned from a trip to West Pokot. Over dinner, she spoke to her friend Diane Lees about the urgent need for mentors for girls there. Moved by stories of young women facing limited access to education and harmful cultural practices. Diane, who worked at the time for an American distributor of information technology products and services, signed up. It wasn’t her first mentorship; she had been paired with a mentee in Rwanda in 2015, but this one would ask something different of her: a relationship with a young woman whose world looked nothing like her own.
Diane was paired with Eunice, and the two began writing to each other by email, later moving to WhatsApp once Eunice got a phone. Through those messages, Diane helped Eunice sit with the disappointment of her closed door instead of rushing past it. Together, they looked at what else was possible, and Eunice settled on a new path: a three-year diploma course in education. Diane sponsored her studies, so Eunice never carried the fear, common among her peers, of being sent home for unpaid fees. For the first time in a long while, she could focus on nothing but learning.
They finally met in person in 2018, when Diane travelled to West Pokot. Diane remembers being surprised that Eunice was taller in real life than she’d appeared on video calls. Eunice remembers sitting under a tree in the scorching sun of West Pokot, quietly worried that Diane would be uncomfortable, until the conversation took over and the heat was forgotten entirely.
“When I met Eunice, she was extremely shy and very quiet,” Diane says. “She has a calm personality but has just grown incredibly. I have seen her perseverance and strength over the years. She never fails to surprise me, just pushing through all the challenges and hurdles of life.” Diane watched her progress through her diploma, graduate, and step into a classroom as a teacher. She watched her become a mother to a son, and later, enrol in a degree program. “Diane has always supported and encouraged me throughout,” Eunice reflects. “It has been a great journey.”
In those nine years, the relationship has been mutual. When Diane’s brother-in-law became ill with cancer, it was Eunice who showed up, checking in, offering encouragement, praying for the family from thousands of miles away. “She was always there for me too, as much as I am for her,” Diane says. It is a small sentence carrying a large shift: the mentee had become, in every way that mattered, a friend holding equal weight in the relationship. Diane has come to believe mentorship works best when it’s rooted in friendship rather than authority, when neither person is imposing expectations on the other, only showing up.
That belief now shapes Diane’s work. She is the Executive Director of Global Give Back Circle, where she works to expand access to mentorship and scholarship opportunities to young women so more young women can experience what she and Eunice built.
And Eunice, now a teacher in a junior school in West Pokot, has learned what it means to pass that forward. In her classroom, she meets students carrying academic and personal struggles from home, and she sees her role as something larger than lessons. “I often encourage the young ones not to lose hope in life,” she says. “Losing hope is not an option. It is a matter of taking one step ahead at a time.” It is advice she once needed to hear herself, in the year she stayed home watching everyone else leave.