By Tilyam Aslam (YES 2019-2020, Pakistan, placed with PAX in Indianapolis, IN)

My journey with YES is and shall always remain an eternal story of change, transformation and empowerment.

As a young girl from Pakistan, I travelled across the ocean to explore the world, discover myself, meet new people and find my voice last year as an exchange student and a youth ambassador of my country.

I often wondered if my journey with the YES program would end when I landed back in Pakistan, but YES will always be a place where I belong, a never-ending journey of learning, growing and becoming. 

As soon as I returned back to my home country, I started working and doing projects as a YES alumna. The very first project that I worked on was an awareness campaign about girls' right to education and reducing child marriages in my native village.

I’ve always been passionate about girls’ education and empowerment. I am blessed and fortunate enough to be a YES alumni, which helped me encourage girls and youths in my region to find their voice. When I first started doing projects, I wasn’t sure if my people would benefit from it, but they turned out to be more beneficial than I imagined.

The best parts of the projects have been the curiosity and interest the girls showed. During the first project, a girl shared her experience of how she fought with her family to go to school. She is extremely passionate about going to university and later becoming a teacher in the school where she studies now. I loved her passion towards education and how she has been fighting back.

As soon as I was done with the first project, I told myself that it shouldn’t be the only one, but rather should be one in a continuous fight to give back to this community as much as I can through the experiences I had and the lessons I’ve learned during my stay in the USA.

A month later, with the constant support of the YES staff in Pakistan and other fellow alumni, I worked on another project named “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teenagers” in two different schools in my city. We shared the importance of habits and how they can shape us to be better individuals for ourselves and for our communities. This project was huge to me and I'm so happy that I was able to interact with the youth and share my experiences with them.

I'm looking forward to many more projects in my community in the future because that's what I have learned throughout my exchange year—to serve people, to give back and to create pathways for others.

Even though I am still a high school student and I'm busy with my studies too, the people I meet and the stories I hear make me so much more committed to giving back to this beautiful place and to empowering and inspiring the people of Pakistan to do more, to look for opportunities and possibilities in life and, most importantly, to be better individuals for ourselves and for our communities.