Wilhem Hector

Wilhem arrived in Flekke in 2019 having never seen snow, leaving Haiti for the first time. At RCN he built a mini wind turbine for his Extended Essay — a project that defined the next decade of his life. He went on to study Mechanical Engineering at MIT, researching wind power modeling, interning at wind energy firms in the US and Denmark, and raising over $80,000 for the Hector Foundation, a nonprofit he co-founded to expand education access in Haiti. In 2024 he became the first Haitian national ever named a Rhodes Scholar. He's now at Oxford pursuing a master's in Energy Systems, with plans to return to Haiti to build its renewable energy infrastructure. The Foundation has helped over 120 young Haitians access higher education and built the country's first open-use engineering makerspace — designed as a direct alternative to gang recruitment for young people in Port-au-Prince.