8,600 of us piled into school buses where we had various assignments on what today's activities would be. As we rode to our particular project location, our bus captain briefed us on what to expect in our service location, including stats on the safety of the location, and what an average school age child's life was like at our destination point. My singles branch was assigned to Hedges Elementary school in the Back of Yards neighborhood on the south side. This neighborhood was made famous by Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle... and is so named The Back of Yards, because it was originally the place polish immigrants lived that worked in the union stockyards in the mid 1800's. It is one of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods to date, and although a revival in the 1970's made the area livable, today, it consists of some of the most dangerous Mexican- American and African- American gang wars in the United States.
I couldn't help thinking about the children that walked the halls on a daily basis. The school is beautiful... hundreds of years old, and to me, it was a work of art. However, the facts read plainly that this was a disintegrated neighborhood... the classrooms are very overcrowded, the paint was peeling off the walls, and I would be very surprised if this building met earthquake or fire codes. There were 6 large classrooms for 990 children Pre- Kindergarten through 8th grade. We learned that 97% of the population of the children that attend this elementary school come from single mother homes. 90% of the children that come from single mother homes have fathers that are incarcerated in the federal prison system, most incarcerated for gang related homicide.
How different my childhood was. I worried about my neighbor down the street bringing hostess cupcakes to school; these children worried about their neighbor down the street bringing guns to school. I went to school counseling when my dad got hurt in a work related injury; these kid's school programs couldn't provide counseling... even though their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters were dead because of gang violence. There was no security system to even provide the slightest protection for these kids, because the Chicago public school system did not even have the means to provide the paint that we used to paint the walls.
Who will remember these kids? We served 39 different elementary schools in various inter-city areas on Saturday, painting, sanitizing, and organizing... but is it enough? No. A fresh coat of paint will not wash away the blood that these walls contain. The flower boxes we built and filled with flowers will not stand guard to protect these innocent children, born into circumstances they cannot control. What choices will they make tomorrow? What kind of situations will they find themselves in, in the weeks to come?
I need to volunteer more so that I can remember where my heart is. My heart is not in dating the BYU football player, or having my picture in the society pages of Chicago Social, although that has been done too. I have paid $250 for a stupid pair of shoes... where may the money have been better spent? I know that if I can lose myself in service, that is when I can truly also find myself and lose my natural man that so wants to be developed at times.
