Next year, E2E will have reached a milestone I could have never fathomed when
I set out to start my first bake sale – the 10-year mark since we started our first
school. A decade of working in rural communities brings with it as many adventures
as you can imagine. Ten years of 4WDs trapped in mud, cattle road blocks, the
scorching afternoon heat, the frigid morning chills, the jaw dropping views of of the
mountain range filled with coffee plants and pine trees, the graduations, the
inaugurations, the heartache when a student you believed in leaves, and the
immense joy when a student you believed in makes it to the end.
This year has led me to revisit how we measure our success. What are the true
indicators of the impact we’ve created throughout the years? Is it # of schools? # of
students? Size of our annual budget? # of donors? These all seem important
enough to convey our effectiveness as a nonprofit organization. But there are
moments where no quantitative metric can properly capture the change E2E has
created in rural communities across Honduras. Times where even I as the founder
am left speechless not having fully comprehended just how much a young person’s
entire outlook on life can be transformed by an opportunity. We track a lot of
outcomes as an organization working in education – attendance, retention,
academic performance, graduation rates etc.
But how do you track a student’s personal development and growth in resiliency to
overcome the external pressures of machismo culture, the growing influence of
drugs and alcohol, and the pervasive discouragement of adults who don’t believe in
educating girls? This achievement can only authentically be told through the voices
of our students.
Hope is a word that connects the many stories I’ve heard particularly from
girls in our schools – both the loss of it and its reemergence. Hope can be
easily buried. For every year that passes, a young girl looks around and sees
no path ahead. She hears the voices of her neighbors or sometimes her own
parents telling her she’ll never study – to do so would be a waste of time, an
embarrassing dream. So hope sinks deeper into the ground until light can no
longer reach it. Or so it seems. Until one day that girl hears rumors that an
organization is arriving that wants to discuss bringing secondary school to the
community. Suddenly hope is no longer just that thing buried in the ground. It
is now the ground on which all other things start to grow. When a student has
hope everything can change for her.
As you’ll see on every page, we’ve dedicated a section to the words of one of
this year’s high school graduates and aspiring writer, Denia. Earlier this year,
Denia unexpectedly sent us a story she had written that told the history of E2E
in her community and what it had sparked in the hearts of its students.
To all of our supporters, thank you for sticking with us all these years and if
you’re new, welcome to the journey. You join a small but mighty group of
steadfast education guardians working day in and day out to do what many
deemed impossible. Reaching the kids who live far off the beaten path and
investing in them to build the future they envision.
In gratitude
