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.