Led by a Methodist pastor and his wife, Buen Samaritano housed more than 70 migrants that day, half of them minors. Children swept swirling desert dust out of the temple area, where the altar was curtained off to create the classroom.
Ten-year-old Aritzi Ciriaco, a fourth grader from Michoacan who had been at Buen Samaritano since August with her parents and grandparents, couldn’t wait to get started on the day’s Spanish exercises. She worried that learning English and navigating U.S. schools would be hard once they cross the border.
“The teachers were telling me that there you can’t miss a single class,” Aritzi said “Still, it’s good to know other countries.”
Other challenges for the instructors include catching up students who arrive unable to read or write.
“We are faced with all kinds of falling behind,” said Garcia at Casa Kolping. “But most of all, with a lot of desire to learn. They missed school. When you give them their notebooks, the emotion on their face … some even tell you, ‘How lovely it feels to learn.’”
One chilly spring morning, one of her students, Juan Pacheco, 12, struggled with a punctuation exercise taught in Spanish — his first language is Mixtec, one of the many Indigenous tongues in Mexico and Central America.
He had spent more than eight months at Casa Oscar Romero after his family fled the Mexican state of Guerrero, where cartel fighting made it too dangerous to farm even their meager plot of beans.
But with some coaching, Juan successfully completed another task faster than his classmates: drawing a banknote, a cooking pot, a radish and an ear of corn, and explaining which one didn’t fit with the others.
“I don’t like to talk much, but yes, I’m a good student,” Juan said, beaming.
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
This article originally appeared here.
