Pearls My Mother Wore

Yesterday, I started back at Hanna Boys Center to do the volunteer work I do with the students there.  It’s such a terrific volunteer gig for me.  I truly admire the school and their mission, which is “to turn hurt into hope,” as they say.

I’ve been off all summer, so it was good to see everybody.  One very disturbing discovery was that one of the students I had worked with in the past was recently shot and killed in San Francisco, apparently the result of gang activity.  Several of the students were dressed for his funeral when I arrived on campus.  Their wide-eyed concern was deeply moving to me.  For many of the students at Hanna’s, gang warfare is no joke.  Fortunately, on campus, none of that gang nonsense is tolerated.  The young men at Hanna’s must advocate for themselves in order to be admitted into the school.  They have to convince Father Crews and the admittance office that they truly want to change.  Many of them understand that gang activity is exactly what they are trying to escape and miraculously seem to respect each other, to the best of their boyish ability.

I help with reading and writing at the school.  I tell the guys, “Two brains are better than one,” and they generally smile when I say that.  Part of my job is to convince them that I’m really there for their personal benefit.  Many of them initially feel a certain amount of apprehension about me.  It’s difficult for them to comprehend that I might be genuine.

Each period I meet with a different student.  One of the fellows I saw yesterday was quite stone-faced.  It was hard for me to tell if he was willing to work with me or not.  I decided to just keep talking and keep explaining where I was coming from.  That my history had been that I couldn’t read as a kid, that I went on to teach myself how to read when I was in my twenties, and then spent eleven years pursuing a college degree, and I topped that by writing a novel, which gave me the qualifications to assist him, to the best of my ability, with his reading and writing school work.

The librarian, Ms Cook, came over and told me that he had been interested in doing some letter writing.  Great!  I exclaimed.  Then, slowly, it came out that he would like to write his cousin a letter.  Great!  I exclaimed.  Then it came out that his cousin was in prison, Pelican Bay — a notoriously dangerous prison, housing notoriously dangerous people.  “How long has he been there?”  I asked.  “Fifteen years,” was the answer.  I gulped and acknowledged the obvious, “He must have done something really bad then.”  The student just looked down, and we continued on.  The student, it turned out, has never met this cousin.  I’m not sure how old the student is, but he must have been a baby when his relative was incarcerated.

We talked for a few more minutes, and with a lot of encouragement from me, he agreed to move over to one of the computers and began to compose his letter.  This exercise was rich with computer skills and grammar and punctuation teaching opportunities.  But it was the process and the content that I was most interested in.  We basically only got as far as “Dear ___” and “How are you?”  But it is a start.  I’m looking forward to where this may go.

I finished that session feeling like I had just talked somebody off a ledge.  I asked him if anybody had ever sent him a letter.  He thought for a moment and then said no.  “E-mail?”  “No,” he said, tilting his impassive face to the keyboard.

I go to the school to help with learning, but I also go to model stability.  For so many of the guys I work with, and I primarily work with the ones who are struggling the most academically, they simply do not see enough of that, stability.  Their young minds have to contend with so much heavy crap; I have great compassion for them.  I’m grateful for the opportunity to lift their load, if only a little.

Have a great week, and I’ll write again next Friday.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 2nd, 2011 at 10:54 AM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.