This school for girls breaks the cycle of disadvantage through education and empowerment
Imagine being born In a society where education for women is not considered a priority.
In April of this year, my daughter Ami and I took a trip to Guatemala to visit Maia Impact School in Solola. I had long known Martha Lidia Oxi, the Co-Executive Director for External Relations of the school—we had met during a crowdfunding program for girls' education put on by the Elevate Prize Foundation. Lidia was there on behalf of Maia, a school for Mayan girls run by Mayan women, which won the voting hands down. I began offering support for the school, and over the next few years, had several Zoom conversations with Lidia. She introduced me to other prominent people in the school, and students, and my interest grew. I wanted to see the real thing.
For background, 49% of the population of Guatemala is Mayan, and much of the Mayan population does not speak Spanish (although public schools are in Spanish) and is predominantly rural. Mayan girls are said to be born into four disadvantageous situations: They are indigenous, poor, rural, and they are girls. Education for women is not part of the culture.
The typical Mayan girl would perhaps have a few years of elementary education in Kachiquel but would drop out of school to do household tasks at a very early age—she would fetch water, wash clothes, care for younger siblings, and perhaps begin to learn to weave at her mother’s side.
How does a girl break out of this cycle?
To start with, she must have spirit, a strong spirit, and determination to do more for herself. She must look further afield, want more. And when she starts looking for help, looking around for a school, that’s when Maia Impact School comes in.
Maia Impact School takes a class of about 50 new girls each year and then proceeds to turn lives around in seven short years. But to do so, the school must select their girls early, up to a year in advance. They look for talented girls who live in poverty, but not extreme poverty; for the most part, families cover the transportation costs of their daughters. They enroll only one girl per family, simply to impact more families. Most importantly, they insist on commitment from the family—a commitment to support this girl of theirs in her education and let the education run its full course, not to pull her out midway through.
And these are not just empty words. The school has social workers who spend time with each family in their homes at least every six weeks. We were privileged to go along on one such visit while we were in Guatemala: We were with Petro, a lovely and charismatic social worker, when she went to visit the home of Johanna, on a Sunday morning. The family was all home—the visit was expected, of course—father and mother were both soft-spoken but confident, unfazed by visitors, and Johanna and her much younger sister were home. Lidia was with us too and had to do lots of translation.
Petro asked first what language the family would prefer, and they naturally chose Kachiquel. She had brought a board game in which we could all participate, and thus we settled down. The game was simple: Each person would throw a die and move the proper number of squares around—but if you landed on some squares, you had to follow its instructions—as in Monopoly: You will have to stop schooling for a while to give your siblings a chance; miss one turn. You have a boyfriend and are thinking of getting married; miss two turns to think it through. You have been saving your money very well; now you can buy your motorcycle. (The mother of the family got these instructions and beamed!)
After the game, we were all asked to say something about how we were feeling. The mother said she had been thinking about how much better off they would be if they had started planning for life earlier. The father was just happy with the chances his daughter was getting.
In six weeks, Petro will be back to see them and will continue to do so until Johanna graduates.
We spent the next day in the school itself. Maritza Ortiz, Development Director, met us and shepherded us around. The school is in a good strong beautiful building, and the life and energy of the students is apparent everywhere. We peeked into classrooms and computer labs and saw girls bustling to and from their lockers, smiling and talking to each other. We met several people who had been in on the earliest plans of the school, when all they wanted seemed truly impossible. We met Andrea Coche, the Co-Director for Services (meaning she takes care of everything inside the school).
The library is a lovely light, quiet room with well-stocked shelves and often duplicate copies of books that would be distributed to whole classes. Ami’s eyes sought out books meant to teach reproductive health and her face lit up. These were fantastic books, honest and down to earth, sometimes funny, with none of the restraint we sometimes find in our instructional materials on sex ed. (Ami is the Executive Director of Roots of Health, a family-organized nonprofit in Palawan in the Philippines.)
One of the highlights of our day was eating lunch with four girls who had been working hard on their English. One of them, Adela, had recently graduated and had just been invited to a conference in Germany. The other three, Angela, Maribel, and Jennifer Karina, were eleventh and twelfth-grade students, ready and willing to talk about their school lives, telling us they had relatives who would wish for such an opportunity, but also how some neighbors and strangers thought there must be something wrong with girls who would want to go to school.
After graduation comes a launch year, in which the school helps the girls find practicums, employment, graduate school, and special opportunities, depending on each girl’s interest. One girl was invited into a program run by Vital Voices, a U.S. NGO devoted to training and upgrading leadership in social enterprise and service NGOs around the world. Another, Ana Miriam, won a scholarship to study in Canada in the AFS program. Another, Maria Florinda, shared the stage with Michelle Obama as part of the Girls Opportunity Alliance.
Maia is creating a whole new model for Mayan women.