To the Host Mother of the Do-Gooders
I barely remember first meeting you. I rode to your house in a stranger’s car, had climbed in even though I couldn’t fully understand his whistling Spanish. The car shuddered over rocks and potholes, vibration adding a bass line to the pop radio. I watched the earth flash past through a slat in the floor. At your house, the driver handed me off to you.
I worked for a nonprofit that summer, and that might have been the hardest week. My job was to supervise six American volunteers. Before they flew in, I visited the three communities they’d live in, and found host parents willing to put them up. This, my bosses told me, is what we don’t tell our volunteers’ parents: we only find host families two weeks before the kids show up.
Host parent: you. I had so many competing worries, I didn’t think past that. I just met you, with a script that felt impossibly presumptuous: “hello can you host a teenager this summer and can you also feed and house me tonight?” The enormity of the ask embarrassed me so much that I could barely voice it, in my halting classroom Spanish, but you said yes. You fed me the first of many dinners at your table.
Two volunteers stayed in your town every other week—on the alternating weeks, we repaired trails in national parks—and you hosted a sweet, quiet boy. I visited for a night every week he stayed with you.
We ate at your kitchen table: plantains and beans and rice and chicken and more. We swatted the flies that buzzed at every meal. The sink held piles of dishes, a small pellet of remaining soap on its lip. The window behind had vertical metal bars, spaced widely enough that birds could peck at food scraps on the dishes.
Someone had told me you’d once hosted a Peace Corps volunteer. I asked you about it. “Es una experiencia linda,” you said—a beautiful experience, and I nodded agreement—but you hadn’t finished: “para el voluntario.” For the volunteer. You’d liked the volunteer who’d lived with you for two years. He’d enjoyed himself. You were glad.
“I wasn’t prepared for the possibility that Y might not follow X, that just because a person says they’re doing one thing, doesn’t mean they actually do that thing and not something else.”
*
One week, you greeted me with anxious eyes. I asked how things were going. You were having trouble feeding my volunteer, you said. He ate so much.
I hadn’t expected this—the host family setup includes a meal plan, where volunteers eat meals at different people’s houses each day. My other volunteers had that setup, and it worked. The meal plan setup had a flaw, though: the host family’s supposed to organize it.
I had to get to the next community the following day. I asked a young local guy to fill out another meal plan sheet with neighborhood families. He said he would.
I left, with no idea if the fix would take. I hoped it would—thought it would—but I’d thought it would work the first time, too, when I left the sheet with you.
Back in the city, my fellow supervisors and I slept in bunk beds. We each had a top and a bottom bunk to ourselves—we slept on the bottom, and stored our stuff up top. I grabbed a book one day, and saw that insects had tunneled through it, riddling the pages with tiny holes. I inventoried my books: they’d eaten through each of them. I couldn’t find the bugs, just the paths they’d left behind. I started noticing wood dust they’d dropped on my pillow—I hadn’t seen it before, but then, I hadn’t known to look.
Weeks passed. The meal plan worked, sort of. You still bore more burden than I wanted you to have to. I’d asked my bosses for ideas, but they said the organization had a policy not to compensate host families. They didn’t want to cheapen that dynamic—the volunteers would help their communities through their projects. My teenagers painted some buildings by the soccer field. They were supposed to teach the local kids a few times a week, too. They told me they were.
By that point, I’d hurt my ankle, but kept up my weekly hours-long hikes from one community to the next, because I was supposed to. I couldn’t tell the difference between shoulds and is-es anymore. I lived on elevator pitches as realities. I had to hike, they had to teach, you had to feed us. I continued, I believed.
*
One night, after dinner, you showed me a catalogue. It was a general sort of catalogue, like if Target had one, but with fewer options than the store offered. You looked at it with such burning. You flipped the glossy pages: white lace tablecloths, pastel pink children’s toys, everything lindo lindo lindo. I sipped tea you’d made. The naked bulb of your kitchen light cast a glare on the thin images. We sat at your table, by the windows with bars and no glass, under the patched-together corrugated roof. Good enough, I’d thought before, because winter never settled scores here. You didn’t need insulation. Looking at you looking at the catalogue, I saw how badly you wanted.
I was supposedly “doing good.” In meetings, my colleagues and I dissected the most charged verb of community service, “helping,” but we still believed it applied to our work.
And how, exactly, did I see myself “helping”? Cultural exchange, we intoned self-importantly. Community development.
Research has shown that people feel worse about the quality of their lives when they’re around people who have more material goods than they do. My volunteers and I spoke English, came from the land of shopping malls, and had plane tickets to return there.
If you’re traveling to visit a less advantaged place, aren’t you always a missionary, even if you don’t say the name of your god? We didn’t have pamphlets, but we were pamphlets, with our suitcases, quick-drying clothes, photos of our parents’ houses in the suburbs.
I’d pushed through my busy days, long dusty bus rides and longer hikes, struggles to speak Spanish and injuries and illnesses, so flurried that I didn’t try to see the intentions behind the scripts of “my work.”
Then I sat with you, in your kitchen, drinking your tea. Lindo lindo lindo. The Peace Corps volunteer’s experience, lindo. The catalogue I’d have tossed away as junk mail, the things in it everyone I knew would call “junk,” things you’d never get the money to buy, lindo.
I knew theory, and the motions I was supposed to go through to enact it, but had no mechanism to make sure I’d actually do what I meant to. Evals with my bosses graded my professionalism, but not my effectiveness—the factors I had control over, not the ones I didn’t. The factors I didn’t have control over—those landed on you.
I wasn’t prepared for the possibility that Y might not follow X, that just because a person says they’re doing one thing, doesn’t mean they actually do that thing and not something else. My good intentions could not stock your pantry.
Thank you for feeding me. I don’t work for them anymore.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sarah Ruth Bates is a writer based in Tucson, Arizona. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Boston Globe Magazine, Outside, WBUR Cognoscenti, and Appalachia Journal. She’s a first-year MFA candidate in nonfiction and a writing instructor at the University of Arizona, and the Managing Editor of the university’s graduate student literary journal, Sonora Review. She previously studied medical ethics at Harvard Medical School and philosophy at Middlebury College. You can find her here.
Header image by Louis Hansel.