Agros Blog

It’s the holiday season here in Seattle, and people are doing what we used to call “entertaining:” opening their homes, having one another over for food and drink. It’s a time-honored practice; my wife Linda and I are having our own open house in a few days.

At the same time, I am also preparing to lead an Agros group to Honduras in early January. As I work towards both events, my mind goes back to October, when Linda and I were privileged to be able to host Danubia, an Agros villager, and her travel companion Nohemy, an Agros Honduras staff member, for the final day of their Seattle visit.

It was important to me that we have Danubia and Nohemy come over, I had told Linda. Both of them had repeatedly shown me and my fellow travelers hospitality, in their own homes in Honduras. We fed them a lunch I had cooked. We explored our neighborhood a bit. Both are back in their own country, now. I will see them again in a matter of weeks. They won’t be at our open house, but I will be at theirs.

When I return to the Agros village Brisas del Volcán in January and I greet Danubia, who will no doubt have helped lead the village women into cooking a fine lunch for our party of 20 guests, it will be different. She has been in my home, now, as I have been in hers. Linda has shown her pictures of our family. We walked through the Ballard farmer’s market together.

We will see each other better, because we will have seen how we are when we are at home. Danubia has seen something of how we live, of what Linda and I aspire to be when we are at home. Because I have visited her in the past, I have seen that for her life and the lives of her fellow villagers.

There is something about seeing for one’s self. I am reminded of a story that gets enacted and re-told this time of year: A tale of three men travelling a long distance on the say-so of an astronomical anomaly, to visit a couple that had just given birth in temporary housing: the stable of an inn in a garrison town of an occupied country. The three wealthy astonomers came, they gave gifts, they left. We have no record of what they said to the couple, or vice-versa. Why did they make the journey? The narrative tells us about their interest, but the couple they are visiting do not ask the question, and their child is too young to ask an impertinent question.

Agros villagers do sometimes ask why we have come. The answer I give is simple: To see how you are doing on your epic journey to break poverty in a single generation. To encourage that journey, to celebrate it, to listen to your challenges.

This accompaniment is, for me, one of the unique aspects of Agros. Our in-country staff visits villages weekly, doing the work of agronomy and human development, encouraging appropriate entrepreneurial risk, demonstrating the uses of capital and connecting villagers with resources and partners.

But when supporters come to visit, most of us bring little of that expertise, and we are expressly forbidden to bring gifts. We are not visiting the “less fortunate.” Like the family of a marathon runner, we are simply there to witness and encourage the journey.

And like the “wise men” of the story, we usually end up going home by another way.