On her recent trip to LMI, Nikki wanted to see with her own eyes what she had heard from others. “Sometimes you hear things by word of mouth,” she explains. “I needed to come and check it out myself.”

What stood out most to Nikki was the way LMI pulls young women out of their home environments and gives them a space to see life differently. “I still want to think more about this,” she says. “The idea of pulling yourself out of your home environment to learn. Here at LMI they can dream all they want. Maybe when they go home they have to do chores, but here they have that chance to escape that.”

She contrasted the atmosphere on campus with what students often face at home. “The students may feel that their parents don’t have dreams. It’s a fatalistic mindset. Their parents might say, ‘we want you to go to school,’ but they don’t really think it can happen.” For Nikki, that’s why LMI’s model matters: it gives young women space to imagine more than what their families or communities may have believed was possible. “Education gets people out of poverty, and it leads them in new directions,” she says. “Here, they see what’s possible.”

Her reflections highlight both the challenges and the hope: that resilience built on campus can carry students beyond the limits of their hometowns, into a life where education truly transforms the future. “A lot of people in the U.S. don’t realize how big the world is beyond their daily life,” she reflects. “The same goes for many Hondurans — sometimes they don’t leave their own small world. Hondurans learn how powerful education is in opening doors that once felt closed. Americans learn to see beyond their own routines and imagine life through a different lens.”