This October, YTC Celebrates Twenty Visits from Our Friends and Partners in Mexico

Since 2018, YTC students in Cicero and Evanston have taught robotics in Spanish over video calls. A teenager here explains a circuit. A teenager in Durango builds it. Week after week, year after year, they have never been in the same room.

In October, some of them will be.

About seventy students and teachers arrive on the eleventh from Durango and other parts of Mexico. For one week they will work alongside students at Morton East and Evanston Township, the two high schools where YTC started and grew up. It is the twentieth time we have hosted.

The week opens on Indigenous Peoples' Day at Morton East: robotics demonstrations, a networking challenge, and dancers from Cicero and Durango sharing a floor, with community leaders and host families there to meet the visitors.

Many of the families opening their homes came from the places these students are arriving from. In Cicero, hosting a student from Mexico is not charity. It is closer to a homecoming. When we surveyed host families after an earlier visit, the most common request was the simplest one: extend the days.

This year the invitation reaches further than it ever has. A $49,700 grant from the U.S. Department of State took our Mexico program from two schools to twenty-four locations across four states in fifteen months. The students who joined through that expansion are now part of a network spanning two continents — and this is the week they get to see it.

The learning crosses in both directions. Students at Morton East and Evanston will host peers who arrive with their own traditions, their own ambitions, and their own things to teach. The week is built so that the person you have been mentoring through a screen becomes someone you have argued with over a circuit board.

Twenty visits is not an anniversary. It is twenty separate decisions, made over twenty-six years, to keep showing up for each other.

The students arriving in October will carry it from here.