It is, after all, a school

In some ways, El Hogar is miraculously ordinary. Amid some of the worst poverty in the Western Hemisphere, kids who once were digging their meals out of dumpsters and living on the street are sitting in well appointed classrooms in their clean white-pressed uniforms, learning Spanish, Social Studies, and Math.

Hazer, the Math teacher, did a great job engaging the students in learning about identities. The kids seemed to get a kick out of the fact that:

1 / 1 = 1

8000 / 8000 = 1
863, 587 / 863,587 = 1

And the kids seem to really like being there.

Of course, like all schools, there is a day of reckoning. It turned out that on Sunday, some of the mothers of the El Hogar kids came for a visit. Claudia, the director, meets with them to tell them how their kids are doing and then tries to give them some support for the lives that they must return to outside El Hogar. But Sunday was report card day:

Mostly, it was sweet to see how proud the mothers were of their kids and how supportive the teachers were. I don't think report card day is quite the same here as it was for me as a kid.