24-year old MaryAnne Oketch has walked away with Sh. 116 million after winning the US reality show Survivor. MaryAnne is a seminary student from Ajax, Ontario, Canada.

According to EW, Maryanne was rewarded by the jury in a 7-1-0 vote over Mike Turner and Romeo Escobar after surprising the jury by whipping out the only true secret idol in the game.

“Her win was a stunning turnaround for a contestant who was viewed earlier in the season as a nuisance and an afterthought by her tribemates, but Maryanne showed that her affable goofball side masked a savvy and strategic gamer who was able to set up a chess-board worth of moves to clear a path to the end. And once at the end, she sealed the deal with an impressive final Tribal Council performance,” the EW magazine reported.

MaryAnne was quick to point out that she did not use her young age to sway favour with the judges.

“When I came into the merge, I realised that there was a trend. If you were young like under 25, you seemed strategic and you would be voted out,” she said. “So, I basically had to pretend that I had no strategy, and when there were fewer people, I would then show my strategy in the game.”

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MaryAnne’s mother was born in Kenya before moving to Canada where she raised her family.However, MaryAnne was born in Germany and then raised in Canada. She attended McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, where she pursued Integrated Science with a Biochemistry concentration.