Mind the Gap
Attracted to a mainly peaceful form of national service, YUVVIES (Young Urban Volunteers) share their experiences from various volunteer programs across the country...coast to coast, and everywhere in between.
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WASHINGTON, DC (Emily)
The other day, Mr. Rivas* came in again. I admit my heart sinks a little everytime I see him in my doorway, as my coworker visibly sighs relief at the realization that he’s my client and my responsibility. And thus begins the routine of my sluggish Wednesday mornings. My reaction depends on my mood on a particular day—on busy days, annoyance; when I’m tired, it’s more like deflation; today it’s a combination of patience and a hope that he’ll ramble for not quite as long as normal. This day he was up in arms about Maryland and Virginia’s treatment of people, i.e. that they are far behind DC on social services. He had apparently recommended friends to Catholic Charities here in DC for legal help, and I assumed that they were legal residents or undocumented. However, as it turns out, they were actually full-fledged citizens (!) and still had been unable to access the medical care they desperately needed since they were sick but had no insurance. While these people had more options than many of my clients, since they had the advantage of full citizenship, the situation stuck out to me in light of the recent budget debates that may lead to decreases in funding for community health centers like mine.
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PROVIDENCE, RI (Matthew)
Rhode Island, oft confused with Long Island, receives little national attention when it comes to state politics. Wisconsin has been a lightning rod in the media for the past month or so; New Jersey, led by the ambitious and brash Gov. Christie receives its fair share of attention; obviously New York and California’s budgetary problems have been well documented (with special thanks to Chris and his post). Even New Hampshire gets the media spotlight every four years when the Presidential election season starts.
The sordid affairs of Rhode Island state politics, however, remain hidden to most. I was lucky enough to gain a little insight into the problems underlying the $40 million deficit in the Providence School budget by attending a community forum hosted by the School Board and local city councilmen. Prompted by Mayor Tavares’ decision to give dismissal notices to all of the nearly 2,000 Providence teachers, the President of the School Board, Kathleen Crain, felt it was her prerogative to explain the decision and host a Q &A.
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LOS ANGELES, CA (Chris)
In the wake of the recent tsunami in Japan, and the ongoing nuclear crisis which is now dominating the headlines, I find it difficult to focus on anything else. But until Godzilla emerges from the Pacific, there is not much we can do, other than to continue working. So after a long hiatus, the yuvvies are back.
As states around the nation try to mend growing financial deficits while at the same time stimulate stagnant economic growth, legislators wage war deciding where to pull the resources from. And while in some states, the conversation seems to be focused mainly on differing political agendas (I’m looking at you Wisconsin), the general theme of having to “face the music” financially, in one form or another, is rather consistent.
California is no exception. In the wake of massive state budget cuts proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown, Californians are being told that it is better to “take our medicine now,” in the form of welfare, social service, university and health care cuts. Just because you have a Juris Doctor doesn’t make you qualified to give medical advice. The proposals are ambitious, but they also seem a tad rash, not taking fully into account long term effects. One example of how this shortsightedness could cause grave long term harm and actually slow economic recovery is the mental health field.
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PROVIDENCE, RI (Matthew)
AmeriCorps volunteers in the state of Rhode Island had a “day-on,” instead of a “day-off,” on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We were invited to Providence College to attend a Martin Luther King Jr. Institute, which was supposed to consist of an active reflection on the work and thought of Dr. King. Fooled once again into believing that large non-profit organizations can effectively run academic-like programs, I was less than impressed by the depth of the reflection. From a keynote speech by a local middle school principal about education reform, to a group kumbaya song, our MLK Institute failed to seriously consider what injustices Dr. King would be trying to rectify if he were alive today.
However poorly I thought the program was run, it did give me the opportunity to think about how Dr. King has inspired my own year of service, and more broadly, what he would be dreaming about today. In the week leading up to the Institute, I read and encouraged my Corps to read the “I have a dream” speech (which you can find in Charlie’s last post) and “A Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” In both of these works, Dr. King discusses the themes of injustice and human solidarity. While I’m not exactly an advocate for the increasing rhetoric of global citizenry or a transnational world, it is of utmost importance that we heed Dr. King’s words when he wrote, “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
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BOSTON (Charlie)
Martin Luther King, Jr. would have turned 82 this week. I wonder sometimes what he’d say about our country today, and the world we live in forty-three years after his death. Would he see a Black man in the Oval Office and be filled with pride, or would he look upon the continued gap between the African-American and White society and feel his heart filled with contempt for the decades of empty rhetoric and broken promises?
The battle for ownership of Dr. King’s legacy is one that threatens to remove the symbol from the actual man. Dr. King was a living, breathing man who once walked this earth amongst us. He was not a saint; indeed, I often wonder how history would remember him if he had survived to be confronted with proof of his adultery or his plagiarism while at Boston University. He was a man, with faults, doubts, fears and – I’m sure – regrets.
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WASHINGTON, DC (Emily)
During the first DC snow “storm” of the year (after which one inch remained on the ground), an unexpected solution to my lack-of-holiday-post problem turned up during my daily half hour in the lunch room. Some women were telling stories of their past Christmases, and one who works upstairs in the diabetes and lifestyle health department was telling us about her most memorable holiday. It was unclear whether the story she told had really taken place at Christmas or whether she was telling it simply because thinking of family reminded her of the holidays—either way, it certainly brought to mind the meaning of the celebration for me as I listened, enthralled, and quietly ate my leftovers in the corner.
Barbara is from Columbia, and for her, remembering Christmases meant a flashback to when she was only six years old. The history of Columbia is complicated, but the overarching theme is violent civil war that often targets civilians and displacement for many Columbians—for Barbara and many, many others, bandoleros robbed her of a proper childhood and life in her native country. That particular Christmas, guerrillas murdered her grandmother, grandfather, and father.
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BRONX, NY (Hannah)
I usher in my favorite part of the day with precisely 25 pumps from an economy-size bottle of hand sanitizer into a pinwheel of little brown hands.
After the morning weather check, a formal meet and greet with a new member of our alphabet family, and a bathroom break, it is finally time.
The lights go off. The Christmas lights come on.
And we begin to dance. Oh, we dance.
These days we begin with the Hora, shake our handmade rain sticks to some traditional African drumming, jiggle our bellies like mini bowls full of jelly, and top it all off with a round of Feliz Navidad. We cover all of December’s best girls—Christmas, Kwanzaa, and Chanukah—all in just fifteen minutes.
As the lights come back on and our discoteca slowly morphs back into a regular preschool classroom I am left thinking about the little girls and how they adore twirling and waltzing like descendents of sugar plum fairies.
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BOSTON (Charlie)Every Christmas morning, when I was a kid, there was a stocking sitting at the foot of my bed when I woke up. My sisters and I would descend downstairs to find the floor beneath our Christmas tree stuffed full of presents, and then my parents would drink coffee and watch as we worked our way, one gift at a time, through the candy and small presents in our stockings and the big ones under the tree. We repeated this every year until very recently; even as adults, the process continued.
When I was very young and still a believer in Santa Claus, I assumed that every family’s Christmas was just like ours. My jarring discovery of his illegitimacy led to the stark realization that not every kid in the world was visited by Santa on Christmas Eve. If their families didn’t have enough money for gifts, they just didn’t get any. Looking back, this may have been the first thing in my life that alerted me to unfairness in the world, and the unequal abundance that I received by chance of birth.
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PROVIDENCE, RI (Matthew)
Zeibeth Martinez is a third grader from Providence, RI. She attends a charter school that caters to the urban population of youth in Providence and focuses its curriculum on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. After school ends, she takes a bus across town to Martin Luther King Elementary, where I work. Over the passed few months, I have gotten to know Zeibeth and have been impressed by her maturity and confidence. I wanted to share her story with you:
MJ: Zeibeth, what do you like most about being in school?
ZM: Well, I like recess, of course, and I also like the read-alouds.
MJ: Do you enjoy being in the after-school program?
ZM: Yes! I’ve been here since 1st grade, so this is my third year. I didn’t like other camps that I’ve been to but I really like this one.
MJ: What do you think you would be doing if you weren’t in the after-school program?
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BRONX, NY (Hannah)
I resolve to call it progress as I carefully snap off the lid to the plastic container and place the birthday cake down in front of the little girl.
It is 8a.m. and she is digging her plastic fork into a thick coat of sugar-injected blue icing. She is only four so the large piece of cake qualifies as the “best breakfast in the world” to her. It is me who is growing anxious, biting the brim of my Styrofoam cup as I calculate the nutrients that most definitely fled out of the batter when the chunks of fudge paraded in.
Her second day of eating birthday cake for breakfast is still considered progress though, especially when placed next to the empty lunch box she carried just two days prior.
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PROVIDENCE (Matthew)
“When I get home and my mom sees me like this, she’s gonna beat me red!” What do you say to an eight year old after you just asked them to splash around in a warm mixture of water and liquid glue and knew that they might get a few drops on themselves? Do you expect them to respond with laughter after they tell you that their parents will hit them because they got their clothes dirty? Do you expect two other children to say the same thing?
I didn’t. I expected the paper mache project to go smoothly. I expected the kids to love working with balloons and glue, and if they got dirty, so what? Don’t eight year olds want to get dirty?
For the first time, I felt out of place. I thought that I knew Rhode Island. After all, I’ve spent my whole life here. My brother did volunteer work in New Orleans, LA and Newark, NJ, and I would hear horror stories from some of his worst days. Providence, I thought, isn’t that bad. It certainly has problems, but who could compare Providence to other crime capitals, like Detroit, MI or Los Angeles, CA. Do parents still beat their children? It’s 2010. Didn’t that stop?
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BOSTON (Charlie)
This has been a trying week for me in a lot of ways. Matthew is spending weeks in a residential intake program at a children’s mental health center. “Jamal,” one of my 8th graders, and his mother witnessed a murder in front of his home as he got off the school bus on Thursday. For a child who was already largely afraid of the world – one of the brightest kids in our school, he suffers from Asperber’s – it may end up being the worst thing imaginable. His mother, a kind, gentle, and caring woman, is shaken up perhaps worse than he is. My job in the days to follow is simply to look out for changes in his behavior. Tonight, I got a small taste of what his weekend was like when I came home to find my block closed down in the midst of a murder investigation.
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LOS ANGELES (Chris)
This past weekend I visited Tijuana with a group of yuvvies. The Mexican metropolis shares a border with San Diego, which represents an abrupt convergence of first and third worlds. Everyday, it is estimated that around 300,000 people enter Tijuana from two crossing points, making it the most heavily trafficked border in the world. Many American citizens travel there for a quick and easy vacation, where the American dollar goes a long way, and alcohol can be purchased three years younger. The fellow yuvvies and I went down there to work at a shelter for victims of domestic violence and their families, and also to eat fish tacos. Hogar Refugio de Debora (Deborah’s House) is a shelter that was founded by American missionaries and built mainly by groups of volunteers over the past five years.
In-between sorting through bags of donated clothing, pouring concrete, and playing soccer with the children staying in the shelter, I had a lot of time to reflect on some of the issues I have been learning about over the past few months— time mainly provided by my limited Spanish speaking ability. It was a beautiful opportunity to do some much needed work around the shelter, but more importantly to spend time with children who have been abandoned by all the male influences in their life, and to inspire a bit of hope that things can be different.
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PHOENIX (Christine)
A month has passed since my last post (Laboring in Phoenix), which I had to re-read myself, so if anyone else has to, no harm done.
Sometimes, I get too bogged down by the amount of “paperwork” and requirements that needs to be met to keep a nonprofit or social service agency afloat. The service reports, the job verification forms, the case notes, the emails, the phone calls … On one hand, the data proves growth or the need for more resources (money mostly) to keep things going. On the other hand, there’s a client sitting outside my office who needs to see me to discuss job leads.
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WASHINGTON, DC (Emily)
One of most important things I have discovered about healthcare I learned during my year and a half of working in Tufts Medical Center’s Emergency Room through Boston College’s PULSE co-curricular service program. An ER, at least in theory, is a place where people are simply waiting to be discharged and get on with their lives or move to a room somewhere in the elusive “upstairs,” receiving more specific and concentrated care elsewhere in the hospital. This means that patients are generally there for only a short period of time, providing for a very unique volunteer experience. While most of my follow PULSE students were in after-school programs, homeless shelters, and similar, “traditional” placements in which they could forge lasting and continuous relationships with their clients, I was limited to a mere five to ten minutes with each person. Thankfully, our supervisor was well aware of this challenge inherent to such a distinctive placement, and she enlightened us to the nuances of this type of service. Despite the fact that we had only a fleeting few moments with each patient, the simple act of listening to a story, offering a Styrofoam cup of water, or sitting in the room with someone who is most likely bored, scared, tired, or all of the above can make more of a positive impact than one tends to realize.
