What a Home Visit Actually Involves

Almost everything we do begins in somebody's house. If we had to name a method rather than a programme, that would be it. We go, we sit down, and what we learn there decides what happens next.

The phrase "home visit" appears in a great many organisational reports and can mean almost anything. So it is worth setting out what ours involve, what we refuse to do, and why we come back.

Why the house and not an office

An interview in an office produces an account. A visit produces conditions. The two are not the same thing, and where they differ it is usually the account that is wrong.

This is not because people lie. A question like "does the child have somewhere to study" gets answered against whatever the person is comparing it to, and nobody wants to describe their own home badly to a stranger who might be about to help them. Standing in the room removes the need to ask.

There is also a cost. Travelling to an office takes fare and most of a day, and the households least able to spare either are the ones we are registered to work with. An office-only process quietly selects against them.

What we look at

Where the child sleeps and where they study. Not whether the family says there is space, but whether there is a bed or a mat, a surface, and light in the evening. Homework done on the floor in the dark becomes a school problem that gets treated as laziness.

Whether there is food in the house today. Today, specifically. General questions about eating get general answers. What is in the kitchen this afternoon is a fact.

Who else lives here. Who sleeps in the house, who earns, who is away, who is caring for whom. Households rearrange themselves constantly, and a child recorded as living with a parent may in practice be raised by a grandmother who is herself frail.

Whether an older person can reach water and a latrine. This is the question that most often changes our answer. A latrine down a slope, across a compound or up a step is not reachable by someone who cannot walk unaided, and certainly not at night. Water is the same, and people rarely raise it themselves.

What we deliberately do not do

We do not photograph people in distress. Pictures of a hungry child or an elderly person on a bare floor raise money, and that is exactly the problem. Somebody asking for help is in no position to refuse a camera, so their agreement is worth little. A household is not material.

We do not arrive unannounced. A visit is agreed beforehand, usually through someone the household already knows. Turning up at a door without warning is an inspection rather than a visit, and it puts a family on the back foot in their own home.

We do not promise what we cannot deliver. A vague reassurance is the most damaging thing anyone can leave behind in a house. If we do not know whether we can help, we say so, and we say when we will know. A household planning around a promise that never arrives is worse off than one told plainly no.

Why the second visit matters more than the first

A first visit is a performance, and reasonably so. The house has been tidied. The account we are given is the one the family has rehearsed, often because they have given it before to somebody who then did nothing.

The second visit is where you meet the ordinary week. What was arranged for us has relaxed. Things described as occasional turn out to be constant, or the reverse. The person who was out the first time is at home, and is sometimes the one the household depends on.

It is also a test of us rather than of them. Plenty of people have been visited once by an organisation that never came back. Returning on the day we said we would says more about us than anything we could put in writing.

It is also the only way to learn whether the first visit achieved anything. A referral is not an outcome: being told which office to go to is not the same as having gone, been seen, and come away with something.

Why this is the method and not a formality

We are a small Community Based Organisation registered in Ruiru to care for orphans and vulnerable children, the elderly and people with disabilities, and to do advocacy, networking and community building. Our registration details are on the about page. We have no capacity for large surveys and no reason to want one. What we have is proximity.

Visiting is what turns proximity into something usable. It is also what makes us answerable: because we have sat in the house, we can say which household received what and explain why, and anyone who supports us is entitled to ask.

Sometimes the conclusion is that we are not the right help, and the useful thing we do is knowing who to ask instead. That still required going.

If there is a household near us you are worried about, get in touch.