Multiplication

Yesterday I went with 5 other staff women to Villa de Juarez to help with the morning routine and get the kids off to their afternoon school. They've got around 20 kids with one caregiver and a cook, so they can use some help! We got there right around homework time, so I settled in to help a little boy who needed to write each of his vowels 5 times. After 10 minutes of struggle I passed him off to another staff woman who has better Spanish. He made his rounds through 4 of us before finding Kathy who worked a miracle and had his homework done and him giggling in about 10 minutes. Anyways, after the failed vowel writing I found Ruby who is around 11 yrs and and was working on her multiplication tables. Math homework in Mexico is my favorite because I know my numbers and can actually help! This probably just blew my mom away, I think world war 3 may have been staged in our house when I had to do math homework as a kid. Ruby and I made our way through all her multiplication tables and then worked on memorizing them together since I couldn't remember them all either.

One of the huge needs with the casa hogars we serve is that the kids are falling behind in school. Ruby, for example, didn't know the number 80 when I wrote it down and didn't really understand that as you go through the multiplication tables you count up (if 7x2 is 14, 7x3 can't be 6). At Douglas we've been able to hire a tutor and we have staff going there every afternoon to help the kids with their homework. I would love it if we could get tutors at each casa hogar each day, and until then hopefully we can keep getting staff and groups out to the homes to fill in the gaps.