Week six summer service papers
Week Six
Restorative Justice – small scale
The small scale of my summer service project has been both a blessing and a drawback. Since I’m so focused on helping the children right at that moment, I don’t get to learn much about their backgrounds or about the larger picture. However, at the same time I can see some of the principles contained in our readings acted out on a smaller scale. I found this to be the case with the topic of restorative justice.
Howard Zehr writes, “If we pursue justice as respect, we will do justice restoratively” (The Little Book of Restorative Justice 36). The main rule for Summer in the City is respect: for people, places, and equipment. Oftentimes, when the children in my group are doing something “wrong,” I’ll simply ask them if their actions are showing respect. Usually, when they’re forced to think about what they’re doing in these terms, they will stop.
Of course, not all discipline problems are settled this easily. Wednesday of camp this week was a difficult day overall. The children had been coming to camp for over three weeks and were starting to get bored with the general format of the day. Everyone seemed restless and a little temperamental. The climax came when two of my boys, Dima and Obssa, got in a fight over a swing. By the time I arrived at the swing set, there had been yelling, pushing, biting, and finally crying. I marched both boys over to Anita, the assistant director.
The first step for any major disciplinary action at Summer in the City is a talk with the assistant director or the director. Anita and Julia try to explain to the offenders why their actions were wrong. Our goal in doing this is the same as several aims of restorative justice: “mak[ing] justice more healing and ideally, more transformative…reduce the likelihood of future offenses…[help] offenders understand how their actions have affected other people” (Zehr 37). For Dima and Obssa, this meant a talk about how friendship and respect means that you must play fairly and take turns. For their actual punishment, they were banned from the swings for the rest of the day. Because they were both “victims” in a sense, the punishment they both received was the same one they would have chosen for each other. As a final step toward healing, we encouraged them to find an activity they could enjoy together.
It seems almost strange to me that Howard Zehr would need to write an explanation of restorative justice when it’s acted out in schoolyards all the time. Maybe it’s just simpler for children, because most of their wrongdoing can be easily undone. Or perhaps it will take many more years of enacting restorative justice on a small scale before it becomes accepted in the adult world.
The End in Sight
We finished our fourth week of camp on Friday, meaning we only have one week left. Sometimes it feels like I’ve been going to camp forever, and the days of pre-SSPI relaxing are just a faint memory. Other times, I can’t believe that we’re this close to the end of camp, and that I’ve only known these children for four weeks.
Each counselor had to complete a written evaluation of each child in their group at the beginning of camp, and now next week we’ll have to complete another one. To be honest, the time together has been so short that I’m not sure I’ve seen any improvement in the children. I guess I’ve seen a few gradual changes – in their relationship with me and with each other – but nothing really life changing.
That’s why reading Henri Nouwen’s story about John and Mr. Harrison was strangely comforting to me. John was trying to do things “by the book,” by being intellectually present to Mr. Harrison in conversation, in order to lead Mr. Harrison to a deeper faith. However, this approach failed. I am pretty certain it wouldn’t work at Summer in the City also – just the thought of trying to have a deep conversation while surrounded by the madness of the playground is amusing. But thankfully, Nouwen doesn’t dwell on John’s failure. Instead, he presents a better solution: “Let us not diminish the power of waiting by saying that a lifesaving relationship cannot develop in an hour,” he writes. “One eye movement or one handshake can replace years of friendship when a person is in agony. Not only does love last forever but it needs only a second to come about” (85).
The kids are already excited about the end of summer school and camp, but I’m wondering how much more I can do in just a week. In looking back over the previous month, however, the most memorable times to me were also very short. For example, Estefany slept in my lap for only about 10 minutes. I had a 5-minute conversation with a tearful Vlada thinking of things we both liked about her. A few minutes on the playground alone with my autistic boy, Dima, has led to him being more open and trusting with me. There are only 20 hours left in camp, but using Nouwen’s logic, that means there are thousands of seconds left to love.
Christian Comedy
My cousin showed me a video last night of a Christian youth conference she went to, which featured a very funny comedian/musician, who I will link to as soon as I remember his name (or I get it from her). Anyway, he had some great parodies of Christian worship music. His monologue was about the commercialization of Christianity, and wondering how long it would be until our church services were "sponsored" by one corperation or another. For example:
- Krispy Kremes, Krispy Kremes, are what I long for/ Krispy Kremes are what I need/ Krispy Kremes, Krispy Kremes, are what I want to eat/ (Ref:) So take some dough/ and form it/ Take some glaze/ and warm it/ Take a bite/ transform it/ Eat more, eat more, eat more.
- My Dodge is an awesome Dodge/ it's great, it's a really great truck
- Ford I lift your name on high
- Better is Hundai then your Ford/ Better is Hundai then your Dodge/ Better is Hundai then your Porshe/ and a thousand others
- (To the tune of "I can only imagine") I can only eat margerine
He had a couple of non-Christian ones too. Unfortunately, I can't remember all of those, but a few lines stood out.
To Green Day's "I hope you had the time of your life," the song went something like this:
'The ring I just bought you I guess it was a fake'/ 'I'm goin' fishin' with the boys down at the lake/ 'You cannot come but it's during your birthday'/ 'I didn't ask cause I knew it'd be ok'/ If you're a man who wants to live/ a long and happy life/ these are the things you don't say to your wife.
And finally, to John Lennon's "Imagine all the people" it was:
Imagine all the parents/burning down Chuck E. Cheese...(woo ooh) You may think I'm pycho/ But I'm not the only one...
I'm just dreading the next time we sing "Take my life" at church, because my brother and I have been singing these songs all weekend, and I'm not sure I could keep a straight face. Wouldn't that be an awesome practical joke at like youth group tho? I can just see the confused faces...
SSP papers Week Five
Catholic Social Justice
One of the reasons why I enjoy being Catholic is that the principles of Catholicism dovetail so well with “natural law,” the code of morality that is ingrained in each person. Therefore, although Summer in the City wasn’t designed to incorporate Catholic social teachings, several parts of our program fit under the categories described by the Center for Social Concerns in their “Introduction to the Principles of Catholic Social Thought.” Two values that I see especially highlighted in Summer in the City are the preferential option for the poor, and subsitiarity.
As a program focused on serving recent immigrants living in a housing project, Summer in the City by definition gives a preferential option for the poor. We “make a choice to lift up the poor and disadvantaged in very real and concrete ways” (Center for Social Concerns, 61) by allowing the most recent immigrants to attend the camp for free, and giving full or partial scholarships to families who feel they can’t afford the $55 fee. However, we’ve also had to defend this principle to maintain the purpose of the camp. Last year, a volunteer at the Family Center wanted to register her children for the program. Although they were a middle-class family, the mother felt the multi-cultural experience would be good for her children – and she was also attracted by the low cost for what is essentially child care. Last year, she was allowed to participate, but this year she called telling us several of her friends wanted to register their children also. Julia, the coordinator of Summer in the City, was put into a difficult position because technically, nothing in our grants or program description says that only recent immigrants can participate in camp. However, to let suburban families take over the program would be contrary to what we hope to achieve with the camp. We finally decided that we could put those families on a waiting list and they could attend if there were spaces available after all the Sibley Manor residents signed up. They ended up never calling us back.
Camp also fits nicely with the principle of subsitiarity. One of the best parts, I think, of the Summer in the City program are the roles we give to the “counselors-in-training,” or CITs for short. The CITs are all teenagers from the community who help out with camp everyday for all five weeks in exchange for a $100 gift certificate for Target. The CITs are sometimes older siblings of the participants in the camp, or their neighbors, babysitters, and friends. They also are a real help at camp – making snack, taking kids to the bathroom, and helping maintain order. It’s also beneficial to them because they get experience in a job-like situation. I know my own CIT, Getinet, has responded really well to the responsibility we’ve given him. Involving the CITs creates a circle of reciprocity, where the local community benefits from the CITs, and the CITs benefit from the local community.
Juxtaposition
It was about 8:56 in the morning, but the day already promised to be sweltering, and I had the windows of my car rolled all the way down as I took the exit off the freeway to the Family Center. I glanced over my shoulder checking for cars, then scanned the intersection ahead of me – and accidentally made eye contact with a homeless person standing on the corner. She had dusty brown hair tucked back under a baseball cap, and her cardboard sign said “Homeless – single mother – anything will help.” I glanced away quickly and drove off, feeling uncomfortable. The farther I drove, the more I felt like a hypocrite. Here I was, driving to my service project where I was going to help the disadvantaged, and yet I don’t help the needy person standing 20 feet away from me. Maybe she was the mother of one of the kids at camp, or more likely, maybe one of the campers had experienced a similar type of homelessness. Maybe the reasons she needed help were as complicated as those of the Summer in the City children. I pulled into the parking lot feeling very ashamed of myself.
A few days later, the entirety of Summer in the City took a trip out to Camp Butwin, a traditional style camp for children from the St. Paul Jewish Community Center. Our kids were all exhausted by the end of the day, and as the bus bounced and jounced along the dusty road away from Camp Butwin, not a few heads were nodding also. On the crowded bus, I sat with a little girl named Estafany, and she ended up sitting on my lap. Estefany is a shy but trusting, and she felt feather-light on my lap. As the trip wore on, she leaned farther back, until she was snuggled in my arms, asleep. We don’t know much about the lives of any of the campers, but we can guess that Estefany doesn’t have it easy. She’s too skinny for her age, and just a little bit of attention makes her grin from ear-to-ear. As I held her, my thoughts drifted back to the woman standing on the street corner. There, I had failed to act; but I felt like here and now, on this hot bus ride through the suburbs of St. Paul, I was doing something. Perhaps I could even give it an academic term and say that at that point I was “doing theology.”
In “Doing Local Theology,” Clemens Sedmak writes, “This is what making an option [for the poor] is about: seeing the faces and voices behind the facts and figures” (101). Sometimes this is a painful process, such as when I saw the homeless woman; but it can also be a very rewarding experience, like I had with Estefany. I think the difference is being able to respond. Seeing the humanity behind statistics doesn’t do anyone any good unless your behavior changes when you recognize their humanity. Sedmak describes this change as moving from mere “theological eyes” to using “social glasses” (101).
The next time I saw a homeless person on that street corner, I gave him some money and an apple. A small gift, I know, but it represented something larger. My vision had changed.
Summer Service Week Four
Yeah, so they're a...week...late...
Oh well.
Social Analysis
Inspired by this week’s reading by Peter Henriot and Joe Holland, “Social Analysis: Linking Faith and Justice,” I thought I should try a little social analysis myself. My exploration began while running errands this week for camp. Anita and I had to go get food for a speaker who was coming in to teach the kids about healthy snacks. We went to the nearest store, a place called SuperValu, which turned out to be a smallish grocery store. We had a limited amount of petty cash with us, so we tried to find the cheapest food available. But since the SuperValu was so small, we had a hard time finding good deals. I already knew that most of the children attending camp were eligible for free lunches, and that residents of Sibley Manor can get bread from the Family Center or non-perishable goods from a local food shelf. But shopping for myself at SuperValu made me wonder just how hard it was to buy food on a limited budget.
Henriot and Holland recommend we begin by looking at the history of a problem. It appears that the area around Sibley Manor hasn’t changed much in the past decade. All of the stores seem a little old and run down. Apparently, Sibley Manor has been a typical place of residence for refugees and immigrants; ethnic groups tend to arrive in waves before moving upward to better things, just in time for the next wave. These factors imply that there hasn’t been much initiative for new businesses to build in the area and compete for customers.
The next stage of social analysis is examining the structures that impact the problem. This phase involves “identify[ing] key operative structures in a given situation” (24) according to Henriot and Holland. America’s capitalistic system of economy discourages more businesses from locating in the area. The SuperValu was obviously aware of its demographic of shoppers, as demonstrated by the signs posted in several languages, so I’m sure other grocery stores would quickly recognize this also. The immigrants, on a limited budget, would not be a target market for most stores. Therefore, the SuperValu remains as the only local option, and so they can charge higher prices. Other grocery stores, to the best of my knowledge, are about a 15 minute bus ride away – just long enough and expensive enough to be a hassle. Cultural structures may come into play also in discouraging other stores to locate in the neighborhood, because their workforce would be primarily composed of recent immigrants who may or may not completely understand the responsibilities that are assumed to be essential for any job in America.
The third stage of analysis looks at societal divisions – the “intricate dimensions of reality” (27). This question seems to have a clear-cut answer. The owners of SuperValu benefit from charging higher prices, while the residents of Sibley Manor (mainly poor minorities) suffer from poorer selection and greater expenses. However, the employees of SuperValu may benefit from working at a successful grocery store, and the owners appear willing to tolerate the instability of the neighborhood, meaning that the “intricate dimensions of reality” are just that – intricate and complex.
Finally, we must consider the locality of the question. While this is a local problem, it is probably repeated around the country. Neighborhoods populated with poorer minorities tend to have less economic development and thus end up paying more for their goods. The solution is probably local also – perhaps city governments could encourage development through tax breaks or zoning requirements, or offer more transportation services.
Family
While Anita, Julia, and I have been working in a back room of the Family Center, we’re able to overhear some of the conversations between Family Center employees and their clients. One man came in a few weeks ago to try to get a visa for his wife to come to the US from Ethiopia. He was going to have some difficulty, because in his enthusiasm to be able to see her again, he had turned in the paperwork one day before he was allowed to, and now he had to start all over again. He was anxious to see her, he said, because it had been almost a year – and she was the mother of his 18 children! Another family came in recently, a mother and a few children. Their father, they explained, was just plain lost, somewhere amidst the fighting in Ethiopia. They had no idea how to find him, and I’m not sure he even knew they were in the United States.
Yet for all these difficulties, the children in the camp seem to have a very strong concept of family. Many of them do have their entire family intact, and the connections with cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents are very strong. One little girl told me that her family purposefully didn’t inform her mom about an operation that her cousin needed, because they knew that it would make her very upset. “She would cry a lot,” Elizabeth explained, a response that I think would seem unusual to a typical American soccer mom, especially because the cousin in question lived far away in California. Paul Ballard and Pam Couture, in their book Globalization and the Family: A Practical Theological Analysis, list multiple statistics outlining the disruption of the traditional American family, including “50 percent of all new marriages ending in legal separation…(and) nearly 50 percent of all children will spend some time under age 18 in a single parent home” (50). Americans, with such economic wealth and stability, have a one in two chance of keeping their family together. At the same time, these recent immigrants are able to value their family members in spite of difficult circumstances and lengthy separation. It makes me wonder – who is really poorer?
I took another dumb quiz
but this one gave me a nice answer :)
| You Are Incredibly Logical |
(You got 88% of the questions right)
Move over Spock - you're the new master of logic
You think rationally, clearly, and quickly.
A seasoned problem solver, your mind is like a computer! |
randomness
Dairy Queen has just made a commercial connecting their new cream pie blizzards with bees, talking bees who are evidentally interested in blizzards, ensuring that I personally will never, ever, be able to eat said blizzards again.
Notre Dame's alumni magazine has published a little blurb about the Eucharistic Procession I attended during April. Just a
caption and a picture, but nice to see anyway!
Week three summer service papers
Oops, I never actually posted these either. Anyone who read all six papers in a row gets a prize!
Week Three
Camp started!
The Summer in the City camp started on Monday, and I’ve now gone through a whole week. It’s gone pretty well, although it’s also been quite chaotic at times. The afternoons pass in a dizzying blur of children running and playing, lining up, moving on to the next activity, moving, moving, moving – and suddenly it’s time for snack and the bus ride home. Although it’s been exciting, it hasn’t allowed much time for reflection, and I’m just starting to realize how much I’ve learned in this week alone.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a little girl named Nardos who knew everyone’s name within a few months. Now I feel like I know over half the camp in just a few days! My group of kindergarteners is really cute. Sarikha is the smallest kid in the camp, and she really looks up to me. She’s best friends with an African girl named Bemnett. Between Saryka, Bemnett, and another girl named Hunter, I will always know if 1) someone is breaking the rules, or 2) someone needs a push on the swings. Estefany is my last girl. She’s really quiet, and I think she really needs the camp. I feel bad because I think she’s gotten missed in the lunch in all the chaos of kids arriving, and she really should be eating with them. Two of my favorite little boys are Dimitry and Ernesto. Dimitry (Dima for short) always arrives at camp with his overprotective Russian grandmother. He spends the afternoon almost entirely in his own little world – being Spiderman, killing monsters, or working intently on a Lego building. Ernesto will be a heartbreaker when he grows up, because right now he has big chocolate brown eyes and a gap-toothed smile that would melt any female’s heart. Anthony, Obssa, and Esteban are my active boys – difficult to keep track of, but really enthusiastic about what the group is doing.
Besides “my kids,” there’s lots of others I have a special bond with. Meron and Raie have claimed me as the only one who can help them onto the bar for doing flips. Vlada always greets me so excitedly at the beginning of the day, and Oliver is responsible for giving me hugs at the end of the day. Leslie, Giselle, and Jessica are shy Hispanic girls who will give you beautiful smiles once they warm up to you. Then there’s Kidoos, Leah, Edith, Denis, Shoekri, Julie, Tsegreyda…the list goes on. My assistant, Getinet, has been wonderful. He’s about 12 years old we think, although he had to forge a different date on his birth certificate in order to get out of Ethiopia as his sister’s “son.” I’m told that as a participant in camp, he was kind of a sparkplug; but I can really see how being in a position with more responsibility has helped him mature.
Clemens Sedmak writes in Doing Local Theology that “we do theology because of wounded people who have touched us.” I know that most of the children I’m working with are wounded in some sense or another. Vlada’s shoes broke yesterday, and she didn’t have another pair. Some of the kids are so skinny I’m pretty sure I could count their ribs, and others are obviously starved for affection. There have been times where they have touched me; but to be honest, I’ve been told so many times that service projects help the one supposedly “giving” as much as the receivers that that part wasn’t really unexpected. However, I am surprised by how much fun I’ve been having. Today we had water day, and everyone just ran around throwing water at each other. It was one of the best days I’ve had in a long time, and I’m looking forward to seeing them all again next week.
Love
One of the challenging things about doing service, I think, is that you’re constantly busy. This is especially true if your method of doing service involves 50 elementary age children! During the first week of camp, I wanted to try especially hard to establish discipline. I knew that if the children lost respect for me, I wouldn’t be able to control them, and in the long run, camp wouldn’t be as much fun for everyone. But sometimes I feel like my role is more like a sheep-herder’s than a counselor’s.
For example, on Friday a few of my boys were acting up a little on our field trip. They weren’t being bad, but they kept wandering away from the group. I pulled them aside and explained to them that they needed to stay with the group, but on our way back into the main building, one of the same boys ran ahead. This time, I told him quite firmly he had to stay with the group, and sent him to the back of the line to wait until everyone else had entered.
These seem like little corrections barely worth noting when I write them down, but the problem is that when I think over the day, I can’t remember saying anything nice in particular to that little boy. I never yelled at him or spoke out of anger, but I can’t remember an instance where I acted towards him out of love either.
This then, will be my resolution for next week of camp. I’m going to try to concentrate on doing just one act of love, in word or deed, for each child everyday. I can’t do anything huge, and I’ll have to keep my control of the group and not just be nice. Maybe the children won’t even realize that I responded faster to their requests for “underdogs,” or complimented an art project that looks just like everyone else’s, or listened intently to a story that doesn’t seem to have a point. They might not see a change, but I think it will matter to me. As Michael Himes writes, “We cannot experience God unless we love our brothers and sisters, and we cannot love our brothers and sisters without experiencing God” (55). He also writes that it will not be easy to do this – we as humans must serve God in “the tangle of our minds” (60). My personal “tangle” at camp is learning how to balance being “mean” and being loving (although I realize they’re not necessarily exclusive). However, I think this week my call is to more actively and decisively love the children I’m working with.
Edited to change the spellings of some of the names so they're not so easily googled.
Book Meme
Emily has just tagged me, so I guess I "have" to do this now:
1.Total Number of Books I Own
Oh, gosh. Two bookshelves and a bunch on my headboard = 150?
2. The Last Book I bought
I've generally been more of a library person, so I don't buy books all that much. My mom bought Mark Shea's book
"This is My Body: An Evengelical Discovers the Real Presence." Great read, by the way. Clear, concise, and interesting.
3.The Last Book I Read
Sunday Clothes by Thom Lemmons. I've never heard of him before, but this was an interesting piece of Christian fiction that wasn't overly preachy or simple.
4. Five Books That Mean a Lot to Me
The
Anne of Green Gables series. To fully understand me, you have to read them. (Falling in the same category are the Little House books and the Betsy-Tacy-Tib books. At some point in my life, I wanted to be any one of those girls.)
The Four Feathers. The book is waaay better then the movie, and it prominantly features a violin.
Anything by Catherine DuHueck Doherty.
Anything by Jane Austen.
I'll Love You Forever, I'll Like You For Always. A really touching little kid's book.
Mrs. Dunphy's Dog comes to mind here too, cause it was my dad's favorite and he always did the voices. :)
5. Tag five people, and have them do this on their blog.
Um, since Emily,
Holly, and
Katie have all does this, that leaves
Mr. Meuer and...
Mike?
