Katia Gomez traveled to Honduras in the spring of 2009 as part of a volunteer group monitoring water quality and sanitation. The group was tasked with digging trenches and constructing water storage structures in one of the most remote and poverty-stricken regions in the country — itself the third-poorest nation in Latin America. The trip was straight forward enough — help out some villagers for a week, then return home to the comfort of Southern California, where Gomez was about to graduate with a degree in international studies from UC San Diego. But Gomez couldn’t get her experiences and the Honduran people out of her mind. She especially couldn’t get past the notion that the people in the small remote villages she visited were essentially without a way to get more than a sixth-grade education. Furthermore, the girls in the villages — because of a lack of education and opportunities — tended to end up pregnant by the time they were 12 or 13. With the seedling of an idea starting to germinate, Gomez returned to Honduras the following spring, to the community of Pajarillos. This time, she set out only to speak with the villagers and get their thoughts on education. What she discovered was that they were eager to go to high school, but they had virtually no way of doing so — the nearest high school was a three-hour hike away. When she returned stateside, she headed to the library and checked out books on how to start a nonprofit. She then gathered some friends and asked them to help her figure out how to do some fundraising. By the summer of 2010, Educate2Envision was born. “It started just as an idea,” Gomez said. “But then I got in touch with the right person in the government, who said they would help us implement the program, and we started to get small donations. We were getting amounts of $20, $100 and so on. We would just budget accordingly, and we started building.” What Gomez, now 24 and a graduate student at Boston University, started building was a future for the villagers. With the help of the Honduran secretary of education, she was able to build an education center where villagers could continue their studies — or return to them, as the case may be. “Most students drop out by the third grade because they need to work to support their families,” she said. “Now, we have students going on to high school and we have students who weren’t able to be educated when they were younger. We have some adult students in the second grade getting educated for the first time. And for the first time in decades, there were no sixth-grade girls that were pregnant when they graduated.” The road to education wasn’t all smooth, however. The communities Gomez wanted to focus on are situated in the country’s wildest and most untouched wilderness, making traveling there a logistical nightmare. Working with the government, too, wasn’t always easy because officials were more interested in helping communities that were easier to get to. That said, once she made it clear she wanted to bring education to these remote communities, Gomez said, the officials fell in line. Even with her organization’s meager finances, they were able to move the project along. “There was some difficulty as far as finances, but that was something to be expected,” she said. “We were a tiny organization with no big donors, and we were working off of the bare minimum, though I was surprised at how far that money could go. We partnered with the government, and they really tried to make a concerted effort.” Where Gomez said she encountered no resistance at all was from the villagers themselves. When it looked like her pet project might take off, Gomez immediately got the residents involved. “We started having a lot of community meetings to gauge their commitment. I wanted them to tell us if they thought it could work,” she said. “The community was overjoyed. No one had ever tried to help them in this area. No one had recognized the core problem of why they were so poor. It was something they had wanted for so long, and I wanted to make sure they were in on it 100 percent.” With the community’s full support, Gomez was able to bring high school to the community for the first time in its history in early 2011. What proved to be almost harder than implementing the program, however, was finding enough students to attend. In order for the government to commit to supplying the high school curriculum, Gomez needed 10 students with a sixth-grade education. She ended up having to pull students from other nearby communities to make up that class of 10. “It was a real eye-opener,” she said. “In a community of over 800 people, we couldn’t even find 10 students who had made it past sixth grade. These communities are just so on the periphery of society. The government does its best, but it focuses more on urban areas and leaves these rural areas alone.” Now that Pajarillos has the prospect of a bright future, does Gomez think she’ll see an exodus of educated citizens from the rural community to the more modern urban ones? “Surprisingly, no,” she said. “When I’ve asked [community members] why education is important to them, they say they see a need to be filled in the communities. It’s not necessarily an individual desire to grow and leave. A lot of them want to stay in those communities and use their knowledge to help develop them.” As for the ability to help that development along, Gomez won’t have to worry much about the financial side of running a nonprofit for quite some time. On Aug. 21, she won the grand prize of $100,000 toward Educate2Envision on VH1’s DO Something! Awards, a pop culture-dominated show that seeks to honor young world-changers 25 and under with a star-studded event. “Winning the $100,000 was mindblowing,” Gomez said. “We’ve functioned off of $5,000 a year, and we’ve been able to accomplish so much with so little. We have no office and we’re all volunteers, but we love what we do and we’ve been able to make huge changes in these communities. It’s pretty incredible, because I know this will be a game changer.” To learn more about Educate2Envision, visit www.educate2envision.org.
