For most of her life, Winnie Cherotich, a ninth grader in Kenya, bounced from home to home around some of the roughest regions in one of the world’s poorest countries. She spent a lifetime struggling to find enough food, struggling to find decent clothes and struggling to survive.

“Sometimes,” she says, “you just had to starve.”

Today, though, Winnie is standing in bright sunshine in a field outside her new home — the Travellers’ Oasis Centre (TOC), an all-girls’ boarding school in a small village in southern Kenya — and she’s smiling.

“I cannot believe,” she says, “that I have found such a place. I cannot believe how much you have changed my life.”