Last week, I had my first introduction to a ritual that I will complete fourty-two times in this upcoming year: the home visit. Home-visits are something incredibly unique to our school and one of the aspects of the program that drew me to the school.
BECA tries as much as it can to integrate itself into the community that we serve and at the foundation of that is the relationships that are developed between the students, parents and teachers. This relationship is fostered by each teacher visiting every one of their students in their home. By doing so we get to have a better idea of the conditions in which our students are living and have a better understanding of the dynamics of their families.
The middle school team is composed of Mr. Brian (a math teacher who taught with BECA last year) Profe Matt (the 6 foot 6 congenial English teacher who doesn’t speak much Spanish) and I. We decided that being that Matt doesn’t speak Spanish and that Brian already knows the parents from last year, it would be best if we travel in a small gringo herd to visit our students.
I didn’t really know what to expect from our home-visits (except for the presence of refried beans, tortillas and mantequilla, which was later confirmed). The Hondurans that I have encountered so far in Cofradia have seemed grateful that we are here helping out their community, but on the whole are not particularly warm people. We are seen clearly as “others” and the stares that we receive whenever we walk past a group of people is a bit, well, uncomfortable. The lack of warmth was really surprising to me, after having spent so much time in Colombia and Argentina, where I have found people to be almost overwhelming in their warmth and hospitality.
The three of us sat in a small living room at our first home visit, two couches facing one another, with the student next to me and her grandfather sitting in a chair watching the news, which was showing gruesome images of twelve Hondurans that were killed in Mexico en route to the states. Terrifying images and awkward silence. Our student was texting on her phone and showed me an image of her dad that she had taken when he left to the states a year ago, on the same route that the twelve Hondurans took and met their death. My own discomfort with the images on the television at that moment seemed trivial.
We tried to make small talk with our student while her mother and aunt were preparing dinner. We talked about her one true love, Twilight, the vampire series that has enthralled teenie-boppers worldwide. Then dinner was served. Refried beans, plantains, mantequillla, scrambled egg and meat adorned the table. Her mother sat down and joined us and we started talking about her daughter, and we praised her as one of our best students (which was entirely true).
As we were eating we noticed that the grandfather was still sitting in the chair watching us intently with a grin. Kind of weird, we thought. After about a minute of that, he asked us if we were enjoying the meat. Yes, it is quite good, we replied. Then he asked if we knew what it was. Um, beef? I asked, with a bit of trepidation. He beamed with pride and said, “It is wild boar. I shot it on Friday. Here is a picture.” He handed us his cell phone with a pixilated picture of, sure enough, a fat wild boar laying on its back, tongue hanging out of his mouth, with his feet in the air. We all started laughing and the conversation lightened up from there. One home visit down, forty one to go.
