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Home visits: Central to empowerment
When looking at a poor community, the material poverty is the most immediate and striking. Houses made of scrap material, lack of sanitation, food, and health care, polluted water flowing down the street. Indeed these are all concerns, but in focusing on them we can miss other aspects of poverty - a poverty of hope, a poverty of empowerment.
A material fix does nothing to address the fundamental human need to feel that you can work to improve your situation for you and your children. The feeling of powerlessness that too often accompanies material poverty is a tremendous and often overlooked barrier. Addressing that feeling of powerlessness is the essence of true empowerment and the guiding focus of Empowerment International.
Enter the core of the Empowerment International program: The home visit. Though there are some material barriers to keeping kids in school, early on in the program it became clear that the lack of empowerment was a far more significant barrier. Regular home visits by the staff are the core of the program; they are a way to build a relationship of trust with the parents and the children, check on the progress of each child, help with the difficulties both parents and children face, and guide parents toward placing a greater value on their children's education and lives. Each child has a member of staff who regularly checks on their progress, someone they can talk to and who cares about them and their education; this support is crucial to helping them stay focused on school as they are living in a high-risk environment.
We followed Carla, Margarita, and Anielka on various home visits. Usually they would be spotted long before arriving at the house, and the family would excitedly begin bringing chairs out to the front of the house for the visitors to sit in.
Usually it starts with looking through the child's school notebooks; here Carla asks a girl to explain to her what she has been learning in school.
The staff congratulates children on their successes and help them to master material that they are struggling with.
Supporting the parents is a critical part of each home visit. The parents are sending children to school for the first time in their families in many generations. The parents often didn't go to school for long and can't read themselves, so they often don't know how best to help their children as they face challenges in school.
With each home visit, we saw the parents being proud of their children's successes, and concerned if they saw them struggling or slipping. They are very involved in their childrens' education - each home visit is a family affair!
The staff also work to convince parents to keep kids' working hours to a minimum, keeping kids off drugs by talking to them about the problems with drugs. The staff develop relationships that go far beyond school, providing positive guidance in situations where a girl wants to drop out to move in with her boyfriend, or a boy wants to drop out to work for his family to contribute, or a child just doesn't believe in themselves and continuously fails. The relationship of trust between the staff and families is the central way that Empowerment International helps kids to succeed and makes a positive and lasting impact in their lives.
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