Maurilia Coc Macs Memorial Scholarship

Award Amount
160
Criteria

This scholarship is awarded to a student who has completed their first year in the Associate of Arts In Peace and Justice Studies or Liberal Arts Diploma in Peace and Justice Studies programs and is returning for the second year in this program area.

Selection Process
Application.
Story

Maurilia Coc Macs was 4 years old when Mary Ann Morris and Randy Janzen got know her and her family. It was 1993, and the Coc Macs family was part of the first group of refugees to return to the Guatemala after spending the previous ten years in refugee camps in Mexico. They had fled Guatemala, along with approximately 100,000 other people, to escape the massacres and campaign of genocide carried out by the Guatemalan army during the 30 year civil war. Randy and Mary Ann, along with several other Canadian volunteer international observers, lived beside the Coc Macs family for four months, in a make-shift resettlement community in the jungles of northern Guatemala. Randy and Mary Ann have fond memories of Maurilia helping them fetch water, entertaining the Canadian volunteers with her four-yearold antics, and being commissioned by her mother to help the Canadians start their cooking fire when the summer rains made it next to impossible (a lot to ask of a 4 year old!).

On October 8, 1995, two and a half years after Mary Ann and Randy left Guatemala; Maurilia was killed when the Guatemalan army entered her village and opened fire, killing a total of eleven unarmed men, women and children. It was lunchtime, and Maurilia and her family were gathered in the village centre. As witnessed by her friends and family, Maurilia was shot in the back as she ran towards her father seeking safety. Her final words before she died were that she didn’t want to die; she just wanted to go back to school that afternoon to learn how to read and write.

Our hope is that somehow, Maurilia’s dreams to learn how to read and write can be remembered and celebrated through a scholarship in her name, by supporting the opportunity for others who want to study, particularly those who want to learn more about building cultures of peace.