Answers from the Students in Mexico Spring 2012
Greeting | School | Home | Monarch

Next, we visited Jocelyn (5 yrs.) and Roberto (6yrs.) Reyes in their home at dinner time. The Reyes family lives in a community surrounding Angangueo called Nicolás Romero. It takes about 15-20 minutes to drive there.

The Reyes are a typical, traditional, community Mexican family. They are farmers and I keep a very good friendship to them. I admire the way they are traditional, respected in the community, and happily living and preserving most or our roots and traditions. Internet and other media are still not available for the children which does not make them unhappy at all. Here the Reyes family with their grandma and aunts. My daugher Laura Emilia and I are their guests.

1. What do you do after school?

Roberto: "After I have dinner, I help my uncle Artemio feeding the cattle and then I do my homework. Dad works in the city, and when he is here on the weekends, I am not asked to do it, since Dad does it for me."

2. What do you do for fun?

Jocelyn: "I play with my dolls and then I am allowed to watch some TV"

Roberto: " I play foot-ball or marbles and then, I am also allowed to watch some TV."

3. What foods do you like to eat?, do you make tortillas?

Roberto and Jocelyn: We love fried potatos, tacos, pozole and all kinds of food which goes with tortillas and which contains some hot chili. Chiles rellenos might be from our favorite dishes. We adore having rice soup or pasta. We love cakes as well. Every day we eat corn tortillas made at home by our mom or our grandma.

4. What kinds of animals do your raise?

Roberto: "We raise cattle, ducks, chickens and we normally raise rabbits and sheep, but they have just been sold, so Uncle Artemio and Dad will soon buy new ones."

Next, I went back to the streets in our town and managed to gather a group of children to talk for a while. They were, from left to right, Manuel , 10, Lolita, 7, Viridiana, 12, and Valeria, 7, all of them attending elementary school grades in different schools in town.

Here their answers to my following questions to their answers almost in chorus:

1. Do you have to do a lot of chores after school time?

Children: "We are normally asked to do very light chores at home, like ordering our bedrooms or the like, since our parents prefer that we attend our school duties above all."

2. Are there a lot of sports in México?

Children: "We could say that we have all kinds of sports, specially in big cities. The only exception would be winter sports, due to the fact that in our country we do not have snow as it is in other countries in the winter. In small towns and communities like ours, playing foot ball soccer, volley ball, base ball , bycicling and basket ball, could be the most common ones."

3. We get lots of snow in the winter, do you get that too?

Children: "No. Not at all. We get only a little snow in the top or our mountains every year during the winter."

4. What languages do you speak and know?

Children: "We only speak Spanish." Only a few children in our region would really speak some English which is the language commonly tought after our mother language."

5. What is the most famous historical place in México?

Children: "We would say, the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon in Teotihuacan, and the Chichén Itza Monuments in the south as the most representative of our Pre-hispanic México. Then, from the Colonial México, the Zócalo in México City and some other downtown areas of famous cities like Monterrey, Querétaro, Guadalajara, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Veracruz and Morelia Cities.."

Jocelyin and Roberto showing their home.