Empower Maya Youth in a Post-Genocide Community

When Hilce first started middle school at Colegio Horizontes in 2022, she already loved learning. Despite the fact that her parents were unable to continue their education beyond elementary school, Hilce developed a passion for reading and a curiosity about the natural world at the Limitless Horizons Ixil Community Library, where she remembers looking through a microscope for the first time. In elementary school, she recalls, “I became fascinated by plants and curious about how the world worked at a chemical level.”

At Colegio Horizontes, Hilce’s middle and high school curriculum combined traditional academics with career and leadership development programming. Hilce is studying subjects like math, graphic design, and philosophy, and in chemistry, her favorite class, she even got to experience her first chemical reaction in the only science lab in the region. At the same time, her life skills and career pathways courses helped her translate her interest in chemistry into a concrete plan for her future.

 “In my career pathways course, I realized that the way I wanted to translate my fascination with chemistry into a career was through chemical engineering,” she says. 

Over a year ago, Hilce began researching university programs and identifying scholarship opportunities that could make studying Chemical Engineering at the university level possible. In Chajul, where fewer than 1% of residents attend university, this level of preparation and planning is exceptionally rare. In her final year of high school, Hilce has a concrete plan for her future that she is already putting into action as she actively prepares for university entrance exams and applies for scholarships that cover a combination of school and living expenses.

But even as she makes plans to attend university outside of Chajul, Hilce remains deeply connected to her community and the impact she envisions making there upon graduating from college, with dreams of some day having her own medical clinic in town.

“To me, community leadership is leading by example as a woman in Chajul,” she says. “If I become an engineer, I would be breaking stereotypes and demonstrating what is possible for other women.”

Every day, Hilce and her peers are one step closer to high school graduation. In a region where 96% of youth do not complete high school, they are already defying the odds and building real pathways toward becoming the scientists, entrepreneurs, and community leaders they now feel empowered to be.

On November 20, Jennifer and her 22 classmates received their middle school diplomas. In doing so, half became the first in their families to reach this milestone and became part of just 25% of Chajul’s population with middle school degrees. 

Four years ago, before joining Colegio Horizontes, Jennifer didn’t think she would study beyond 6th grade: “I would like to think I would have found a way to continue school, but I don’t know how we would have paid for it,” she says.

The primary income for Jennifer’s family of six comes from her father, a local subsistence tenant farmer. Her mother also takes odd jobs when necessary, like husking corn, washing clothes, and making tortillas. And when money is especially tight, Jennifer and her 10-year-old sister pitch in by making tortillas at a local restaurant. Therefore, the cost of local public middle school which includes tuition, multiple uniforms, school and homework supplies, and one or two meals out of the house each day, was simply out of reach. 

So, when Jennifer walked through the doors of Colegio Horizontes, she wasn’t just starting 7th grade; she was stepping into a completely different future. Over the past three years, surrounded by teachers and mentors who believed in her, Jennifer's confidence grew and so did her world. She learned to pipette, use a centrifuge, and even extract DNA from a banana in Chajul’s first and only state-of-the-art science lab!

She represented Colegio Horizontes at the local Academy of Mayan Languages, practiced English (her third language) with visiting Canadian college students, and interviewed local professionals. And she met and was inspired by indigenous female role models like her class mentor, Marina Caba, Colegio Horizontes director Odilia Cedillo, and Mayan Kaqchikel leader and human rights advocate Lidia Oxi—experiences she never envisioned for herself. All this from a young girl who remembers herself hiding in the back of the classroom, and who barely spoke Spanish as recently as 2021.

With each passing year, Jennifer is transforming from the mentee to the mentor. Just this year, she taught local community members how to use a digital microscope, and competed in Guatemala’s national math and science Olympiads!

Your ongoing support creates opportunities—science skills, public speaking confidence, access to technology—that simply do not exist elsewhere in Chajul, opening doors for Jennifer and Chajul's next generation of leaders to gain the skills they need and build the futures both they and their community deserve.

Thank you for investing in the future of students who are redefining what is possible in Chajul!