give and take

After my dreams of underground rock cult band fandom and starting an awesome Dischord/pre-lame-o-SubPop record label were shattered by the cold reality of lacking mad songwriting skills and business sense, I had dreams of being a high school art teacher, the kind with prints by amazing artists on the walls, a chaotic yet creative environment where awesome music would be playing at all times, where misunderstood kids could express themselves and all the other cliches brought on by even a sparse knowledge of cinema. Of course, I could've have ended up like this too, which would have been sad.

Instead, I majored in English, minored incompletely in art, and did a year of library school and get irritated when people say "Oh you must feel so accomplished to have a master's degree" because so far it's been worthless and almost kept me from getting employment in the first place.

I knew I'd get burned out if I had stayed in art school land or went into the bureaucratic hell that is education anywhere, and let the teacher side out in other areas, which has led to scam-tastic part time gigs where the pay was good but the overlords a particular kind of evil, and general volunteerism that resulted in getting profoundly burned out by being one typical naive cracker attempting to singlehandedly help an entire refugee community.

I soon realized that there were just too many people, that I was enabling instead of empowering, and that being female and unattached meant that I was still considered a rather grown-up kid who had a driver's license but ultimately wasn't taken seriously and there's a difference between helping your kid with homework and helping you with incomprehensible bureaucratic paperwork and giving you rides to places that you can walk to.

So I jumped back into tutoring realm today, doing a couple hours each month in the mornings I go to work late at a tiny charter school around the corner that works with kids that the school system has pretty much given up on. I don't believe that one system of education is the ultimate, having bounced through every educational structure available, but I like what I see here, a kind of rich creative chaos... books that are actually interesting, the basics that one needs to function, and then the good stuff I thrived on as a kid, jars with specimens of bugs and such, the walls covered with Calvin and Hobbes comics, science diagrams, masterpieces of artwork, sayings of Martin Luther King.

They do art and literature in the mornings and math/science/social studies in the afternoon and this morning, each kid got one-on-one time. The other volunteers are high schoolers from Ignatius, college kids from Oberlin, and retirees who decide to share their skills with the next generation.

He introduces me to the kids and tells them that I got arrested once which evidently establishes some street cred or something because they were all much more interested at that point. I get to work one-on-one with three kids at different levels and the see the excitement that comes when poetry isn't just something you read but something that you understand and relate to.

I pulled up pictures of fiddleheads and lichens when we talked about a nature poem, attempted to explain what being on a boat feels like when reading 'Wynken, Blynken and Nod,' told stories about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad and how it wasn't just history that happened somewhere else, that it cut through Cleveland and Oberlin too.

At the same time, it's the best feeling in the world to see one girl read a Gwendolyn Brooks poem about feeling trapped in the city and longing for the country and tell me that's how she and her mom felt when the lived in the projects around the corner, and then to struggle through names like Penelope and Agamemnon to see her get hooked on Greek mythology. I never learned this stuff in grade school until my mom taught me a few years and was stuck reading boring readers full of stupid didactic stories about not doing drugs or something.

Three hours went by like nothing and this is why I loved majoring in literature, because it encompasses everything about the world, with a creative window onto infinite cultures and perspectives and periods of time and history and science and religion of all types. Unlike people I was in grad school with, I don't think that teens need to read about themselves or Gossip Girl all the time. If you give them something more culturally rich and make it interesting, it'll be so much better for everyone.

a b c d...

In the past week, I've somehow ended up with a part-time job that starts on Monday. For three nights a week, I'll be tutoring some of my Saturday kids in reading and math. I've talked in the past about how I feel overwhelmed by the need to do more and this just happened to work out so that I can do something more intensive and one-on-one. Some of the kids are ahead of others, but all of them are still behind.

Last night, I worked with one of my kids who's throwing gang signs in every photo I have of him. He doesn't want to be there at all, but as we were going through the alphabet and reading through a first reader book, he got really into it because he could see how everything worked together for the first time.

I can't imagine getting through life without being able to read and can't remember a time in life when I wasn't able to. I hope that the things that opened up my world will open up theirs as well.

presence

Didn't end up going to Detroit, ended up staying here and catching up with people that I haven't hung out with in too long.

Did stop home to see my family and help out with some wedding planning for my sister before heading down to hang out with the kids, who I haven't seen in a couple weeks now. It was a good thing I stayed in Cleveland this weekend, because we were shorter on volunteers than usual and one of the kids just took off and ran away. He came back, thankfully, but not before I'm running down to Lorain Avenue hoping that he hasn't gotten too far.

I know that what we're doing is really good and important but I feel like I really don't know what I'm doing. The language barrier is huge and I don't know what life is like the other six days of the week when I don't see the kids. They're dealing with a lot more than I could ever imagine, and I guess I wish I knew that it was doing some good helping these kids get some footing instead of it just being something that I feel good about doing.

I don't feel like I have the resources I need, we don't have the extra people to help that we need. A lot of the kids need some one-on-one work and when you've got two or three volunteers for 25 kids, it's just not possible to even try and do that. I don't know how to communicate because of the language barrier, but I'm ordering a State Department course in Kirundi through the library so hopefully that will help out some.

A friend of mine that used to teach is hooking me up with some of her old school supplies, but we need people who will show up to use them.

good things are coming

So I took my day off on Friday and got to be part of building one of those KaBoom! playgrounds and while I didn't feel very productive for the first half of my time there, I certainly did for the second part.

I used to volunteer at Nueva Luz my first year of college and I loved it. This was probably first time in my life that I knew I would be coming back to this city because I saw how much there needed to be done. For being a much more conservative denomination, there was a strong love for people in the community that I was drawn to and they did everything. HIV/AIDS counseling, referral, and emergency housing, food and clothing distribution, community development. There were thirty of us sleeping in the house next door, with almost no heat and one bathroom (no small feat when 25 of us were girls), living on spaghetti and peanut butter and bagels.

Sunday morning services were in Spanish and English and these old hymns I remember from my childhood were done with much more percussion and energy and people were dancing and when it came time to greet each other, it was done with hugs and welcoming in three different languages. In the mornings we'd help out with whatever projects they were doing and in the afternoon we'd hang out with the kids in the neighborhood who played in the yard at the church and at the parking lot next door.

Over time, I got to know some of the kids, got to meet their families, hang out on their porches, going to their high-stepping competitions and seeing what they had to deal with. I remember Andy, the pastor there, giving us $200 and sending us out to K-Mart to buy one family of kids Christmas presents because they weren't going to get anything that year, and while there was a TV in every room, there were no warm blankets or pillows on the beds or much of anything else.

All of them have moved away since there, but it felt so good to see this finally happen for the next generation at least, holding a swirly slide together so someone could put the screws in, painting designs and games on the parking lot, shoveling mulch and putting benches together to a soundtrack of latin music and old-school hip-hop. meeting people from all walks of life, from Keybank employees to construction workers and church people to the neighborhood pot dealer. It didn't matter who you were, just that you showed up to help and seeing this whole thing get put together and how excited the kids were about it... it was just great.

I remember thinking that if I could do stuff like this for the rest of my life, I would be completely happy. As it turns out, I have a job with pretty conventional hours, but I have vacation time and weekends and at this point, I'm going to keep on doing stuff like this in my spare time.