I am working in their Neighborhood Centers program, which is an after school program that works in four different schools here in Norman. We work at two elementary schools and two middle schools four days a week.
Apart from my stint in the service of the Chick-fil-A half dozen, as well as a few brief weeks at Vacation Bible Schools galore, my experience with groups of children has been surprisingly little. High school age kids: yes, I'm all over that. I know how to handle those problems and how to interact appropriately. But I never had the camp counselor experience that so many of my friends have had, and so this consistent and regular interaction with littlest people is way out of the category of skills I would consider my "strong suits."
Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not bad with kids. They don't cry when they see me or suffer physical or emotional trauma every time we interact. I am inexperienced, but I have enough experience with people in general that knowing how to translate these tactics to be effective in handling little sized people is just a work in progress.
But as I was preparing for this year I knew that I wanted to accomplish two things: I wanted to serve other people and I wanted to grow in skill and experience.
So, in that case, working at a job where I don't feel like I know exactly what I'm doing is accomplishing the last half of that. It's granting me the opportunity to learn from people who are more experienced and to learn how to do things myself. And I mean, working with children is useful in essentially every possible business realm that I could enter in to -- because either you're interacting with children or you're interacting with adults who behave like children. From that perspective, this experience is invaluable.
But one thing that's been especially fascinating for me to observe so far is this: This summer in Seattle, I was working with youth ages 13-24. The only part of their story that I knew was their current circumstance - that they were homeless. Sometimes I knew about substance abuse, sometimes I knew about significant others. In rare cases, I knew some background of their past or some of their hopes and dreams for the future. But one of the questions I had in my mind most of the summer was where their stories had diverged from mine. Where had they started acting out in anger when I was being taught to forgive? Where had they stopped communicating with their parents when I was getting to know mine better? When did they spend their first night sleeping out of doors?
Working in the schools that we are, we see children from some of the lower income neighborhoods of Norman. I'm not suggesting that in 10 years these children will be homeless. But I do recognize that some of them are angry and violent with one another - at 10 years old. Some of them have absolutely no regard or respect for adults or for one another. Some of them make sexual or drug references in conversation - at 7 years old. We know that some of them have witnessed or been victim to domestic violence in their homes - at 5 years old.
And through these observations -- even in just the first week that I have been working -- I feel that I am starting to get some answers to my summer-long question. The anger didn't appear overnight. They didn't get upset over the outcome of a football game, punch someone in the face, and spiral downwards from there. Their lives have been more difficult than I could ever imagine from the moment they were born. They have encountered evils that I can only shudder at and try to push from my mind.
People are hurting. Children are hurting. Teenagers are hurting. College students, adults, parents, me. I can't heal the children I see twice a week. I can't "fix" the broken hearts of the youth I spent a summer with. I also can't repair the church, RUF, or my own heart.
This can be disheartening. It can be discouraging. But it can make us yearn for the day when all of this world will be healed - when "everything sad is going to come untrue." Freedom is coming, friends. Every morning brings us closer.
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