By Brittany Rogers
Above image courtesy BYU–Pathway Worldwide
A promise in Kathy Villeda's patriarchal blessing kept her going, even if it took a few more years.
When gangs threatened her schoolteacher father for not passing students, Kathy Villeda Lopez and her family fled El Salvador for the United States, where they were granted asylum. And so Villeda, at age 10, found herself in Minnesota grappling with English.
It is just one of the bends in her story: there’s deportation, financial struggle, divorce, miscarriage, and more.
Through it all, Villeda says she never let go of the idea that Heavenly Father wants more for her.
The idea is even embedded in her patriarchal blessing, she says—a blessing that propelled her in her lowest of lows. “I returned to it again and again,” says Villeda. Among its counsel, “it specifically said the word university—to continue studying—and that when I finish university, opportunities will open up.”
Today Villeda, a graduate of BYU–Pathway Worldwide, bears testimony of that promise. She now makes three times her old salary. She is remarried, to a man she introduced to the Church. And now he’s enrolled in BYU–Pathway too.
“I never gave up,” says Villeda. Not as a 10-year-old desperate to get out of ESL classes and into the mainstream classroom. Not as a 16-year-old working as an accountant to help support her family. And not as a returned missionary who put herself through school while working full-time.
“I kept moving forward in my education,” she says. “Sometimes it was by strides. Sometimes by inches.”
Cultural Whiplash
Moving to the United States was not easy for Villeda’s family. Everything was more expensive, the cost of day care prohibitive. Because of this, Villeda watched her younger brothers while her parents worked.
“Kathy was a mother of her two brothers,” says her father, German Villeda, who praises her caretaking—with one exception. “Let me put it this way,” he says. “She used to cook always eggs. Eggs, eggs, eggs, eggs.” When grandparents visited, says German, the boys greeted them at the airport with, “We’re so glad you’re here! We’re bored to eat eggs!”
Homework was tricky too: “The kids didn’t know English, I didn’t know English,” German says. The family scrambled to absorb the new language while simultaneously reinforcing Spanish at home. “Don’t forget our roots!” German would implore. Attending the Spanish ward, the only one in the state at the time, helped.
Villeda still communicates with some of her teachers in Minnesota who helped her gain traction. She joined a volleyball team and took up the clarinet and saxophone.
Then a 2 a.m. phone call changed everything. Villeda, 16, woke to her mother’s sobs; her father, who had just gotten off his shift, was being detained and deported. “We were devastated,” Villeda recounts, the emotions of that night overtaking her even now, more than a decade later.
Unbeknownst to the family, his asylum had lapsed. While the rest of the family was permitted to stay, her father, the primary breadwinner, was sent back to El Salvador.
“I had to grow up really quick,” says Villeda, who traded extracurriculars for work in a soup restaurant. She also kept the books for an Indian restaurant, learning how from her accountant mother, who took on three jobs herself.
The separation became too much. “This is not a life for us,” Villeda remembers her mother saying. “Families need to be together.” Upon Villeda’s graduation from high school, they rejoined her father in San Salvador.
“It was so hard to talk in Spanish again, to think in Spanish again,” says Villeda, who was constantly translating for her brothers; the youngest, just 3 when they arrived in the States, had all but forgotten. And their parents forbade them from using English outside the home. English came with assumptions—“Oh, these people have money,” Villeda explains—and the threat of kidnapping was real.
In fact, that first year back, their mother rarely allowed them out of the house. “It was part of the culture shock,” says Villeda. “In Minnesota we had the freedom to go in the backyard or to the park. In El Salvador, it was not this way.”
Slowly, they adjusted. Before Villeda served a mission in Guatemala, her parents paid her tuition to study computer science at a local college. Upon her return, Villeda wanted to change majors—a luxury her father refused to fund. “I told her, ‘I will not give you one penny,’” German recalls.
“Unfortunately, as parents we don’t have a manual,” he says looking back. But of the education and career his daughter acquired since, German adds proudly, “she did it by herself.”
A Path Forward
Villeda’s English landed her a call-center job at TELUS International (now TELUS Digital), an IT service provider. She hoped to take college classes concurrently, but the schedules were incompatible.
“Then my stake president heard about BYU–Pathway,” she says. The program was coming to El Salvador.
Through BYU–Pathway, students the world over can access an online CES education. The program offers 28 certificates, 8 associate’s degrees, and 7 bachelor’s degrees, beginning with foundational student-success courses in the first six months. And the price can’t be beat: $28 per credit when Villeda started. (Tuition is adjusted based on the country the student lives in.)
“It had BYU in the name,” says Villeda—that was all she needed to know. She enrolled in 2015 as one of El Salvador’s first 20 BYU–Pathway students.
The first courses cover a wide breadth of content at a fast clip. In seven-week blocks—each devoted to a course on life, professional, or university skills—students are instructed in everything from personal finance to communication to conflict management to the ins and outs of Excel. They have to keep pace online, meeting once a week with other local students either virtually or in person.
The courses—and life—challenged Villeda. Newly married when she began, she divorced during her studies. The drives through San Salvador traffic to and from BYU–Pathway gatherings were difficult, and her church attendance wavered through the ordeal. Even so, her weekly in-person BYU–Pathway gathering, the religion courses, and devotionals, she says, buoyed her up.
She also started gaining credentials.
Bolstering their résumés as they go, BYU–Pathway students earn three certificates as part of their bachelor’s degree, which can be completed in just three years.
“Every time I would get a certificate, I used it to get a salary raise or I would apply for a new position,” Villeda says.
And according to her boss at TELUS, Luis Masferrer, director of planning and strategy, that’s a feat. Villeda started as one of hundreds of call-center agents, all hoping to move up. “You have to really shine,” he says, which Villeda did professionally and personally. She knocked out as many internal trainings as she could, he says, and she was a friend to everyone. “She brings a very good vibe because of her nature and her religion.”
Hector Mena may be her husband, but he can attest. They met as colleagues at TELUS, where Villeda went out of her way to help him succeed. “I was used to having colleagues who were my friends in the office, but when I go out the door, that’s it—right?” says Mena. “Kathy was not like that.” He noticed the same attributes in another colleague who was also a member of the Church of Jesus Christ. “It was like ministering,” says Mena; Villeda ministered to everyone.
Villeda rose to the position of team lead at TELUS, working directly under Masferrer. “Kathy became my right hand,” he says. Creating business forecasts, setting key performance indicators—she did it all.
And then she outgrew the company.
A Blessing Comes True
It was a long haul, starting in 2015, but Villeda did it: she finished her bachelor’s degree in applied business management. The degrees provided by BYU–Pathway are developed and granted by Ensign College and BYU–Idaho, and Villeda wanted to travel to the United States to attend BYU–Idaho’s graduation ceremonies in person.
“I was scared to go to the embassy to get my visa,” says Villeda, scarred from her family’s experiences when she was a teen. Mena persuaded her, standing right by her side. Together they traveled to Rexburg, Idaho, where Mena livestreamed Villedawalking in her 2022 commencement exercises. Friends and family from back home—and former teachers in Minnesota—cheered her on digitally.
“When they said my name to walk, [my family] sent me, like, 500 screenshots,” says Villeda.
And just as her patriarchal blessing, which she obtained only a year into her studies, had promised, a door opened for Villeda. The very next day after graduation, she got a call with a job offer at Bloom, a social-impact staffing agency started by two BYU grads. She first declined—she was making more at TELUS than Bloom initially offered—but when Bloom doubled back with a better-paying director role, “I accepted without hesitation,” says Villeda.
Bloom connects qualified employees around the globe with better-paying remote work—hiring primarily from the pool at BYU–Pathway.
“Kathy is a recipient of the same model,” says Bloom cofounder John Pearce, “and now she’s helping deliver it to thousands. Our whole purpose is to help people exactly like Kathy—people who are super capable, incredibly hardworking—and connect them to opportunities that pay them what they’re worth.”
Like clockwork, Villeda continues to climb the ladder, now as a senior director at Bloom’s sister company, Global Managed Services, which does remote staffing for Church-related entities.
She’s also a leader in her ward, where she and Mena presently serve as Relief Society and elders quorum presidents, and where her experience with trials, she says, comes in handy. “I hope I am teaching women to never give up,” she says.
She continues, “BYU–Pathway changed my life. . . . More than just my salary, I gained self-esteem. I gained faith.”
After two miscarriages, Villeda and her husband welcomed their daughter, Emma, in October 2024. They both work from home, Mena plugging away at his BYU–Pathway degree on the side. And at the end of a workday, they walk to the beach—just a 10-minute stroll away. “We always look for a spot to enjoy the sunset,” she says. “I am just loving this stage.”
As Villeda puts it, “My life is better than I could have imagined reading my [patriarchal] blessing so many years ago.”
