Empower Maya Youth in a Post-Genocide Community

A new school year has recently started in Chajul and our scholars are busy studying, thanks to your support of our work! To support our scholars with their academic needs, Limitless Horizons Ixil offers tutoring classes every Saturday. In prior years, we had one tutor who taught about several of the subjects. The tutor led a lecture-style enrichment class using her own curriculum and mostly focused on reading comprehension in Spanish. Student evaluations conducted at the end of last year taught us that our scholars could benefit even more from tutoring that’s more specifically related to what they are learning in school. Our youth also expressed a desire for more lively interaction with additional time for questions. Specifically, our scholars wanted more support with their Spanish language grammar and writing skills, math in general, and their English classes.

Based on this thoughtful and helpful feedback from our scholars, the Limitless Horizons Ixil team decided to create an alternating schedule throughout the month with each Saturday’s tutoring session focusing on one of these subjects. We have a specific tutor for each subject and we are working closely with the teachers of our partner middle school Colegio San Gaspar to ensure that we are supporting our scholars with the specifics of what they are learning in each subject. The last Saturday of every month is for general academic support and homework help and our Program Manager Edilma, who is trained as a teacher, supports with this session.

In addition, inspired by the popularity and success of the tutoring classes we offer our Youth Development Program scholars, we decided to implement tutoring hours at our Saber Sin Límites (Limitless Knowledge) community library to support all students visiting the library with weekly homework help. Our librarian David helps with physics and chemistry one day each week, and our Saturday math tutor, Santos, supports with math tutoring hours on another day. There’s also English homework help led by Antonio, one of our Youth Development Program graduates and current Operations Intern. We’re thrilled to be able to offer these tutoring hours to everyone in the community!

All of these new tutoring opportunities began in February and we are excited to see the impact they have on students over the course of this year! Thank you for your incredible support of Limitless Horizons Ixil’s work and for helping us to continue improving programs for our youth.