Rico the Pirate Chicken

In honor of the recent holiday, I thought it might be appropriate to tell a short story about this year's Halloween celebration at Bethel New Life's youth mentoring program. Like most good stories, it began with a folding table, fifteen round pumpkins about the size of a soccer ball, and many fistfuls of multi-colored feathers.

We wanted to give the kids in the program a creative activity for Halloween, and painting pumpkins seemed like a great one for the kids we serve, who range in age from five to fifteen. (The thought of carving the pumpkins, while a favorite seasonal activity of mine, with a dozen kids hopped up on Laffy Taffy and fun size Milky Ways scared me more than anything else this Halloween.) When we presented them, along with paper plate palettes of acrylic paint and two old shoe boxes filled with a random assortment of arts and crafts supplies, the kids clamored for the biggest and most misshapen pumpkins of the bunch. When the kids, all in ill-fitting plastic smocks that drooped from their shoulders, had finally settled back in their seats with their bulbous orange canvases waiting expectantly in front of them,  they picked up their paint brushes and got to work.

I'll pause here for a moment to let you all imagine, like I did that afternoon, what your typical painted pumpkin looks like. If you're anything like me, you're imagining pumpkins painted with crooked jack-o-lantern type smiles, green countenances made to look like witches or, with a defter hand, maybe even Frankenstein. Pretty standard, right?

This is not what we got.

I was sitting next to Bobby, a nine year old in the program, who'd asked me to help him with his pumpkin. Admittedly, Bobby is one of my favorite kids in the program -- he generously laughs and my terrible pun jokes and, even though he has a lot of trouble in school, he's one of the quickest and brightest kids I've ever met. While I watched in silent awe, Bobby immediately dug his hand into one of the old shoe boxes and pulled out a handful of artificial feathers and began taking them and stabbing them into the side of his pumpkin. After seven or eight feathers were sticking out from the sides and back of his creation, he turned to me and stated plainly: "It's a chicken."

I looked around the room to gauge the other kids' pumpkins, and saw them gingerly pouring glue and glitter onto the stems, winding pipe cleaners into antennae, and using paint as an afterthought. I turned back to Bobby, who was gently applying a layer of paint to each feather and had just completed a glittery construction paper beak. I asked him what his pumpkin's name was. He paused for a moment and said, "Rico. His name's Rico. He's a pirate chicken." With that declaration he added a large eye patch over to Rico's right eye and then continued working, making a stringy, frazzled beard for Rico out of some pipe cleaners and colored paper.

I am constantly amazed by the kids I get to work with in this program. They are smart, motivated, wickedly funny, living in a world outside the door of our classroom where they are constantly being told (by their friends and often even by their parents and teachers) that they shouldn't be any of those things. Many of them have no support, no one looking out for them, and no one telling them all the good reasons that they shouldn't sell drugs on the corner like their older brothers. Kids with less strength, with less of an ability to buck the system of failure inherent in this neighborhood, lose to drugs and crime every day on the Westside. So every day I see these kids show up at the door, wanting to come into our program, seems like a gift, another day that we've won over some seriously terrible odds.

Bobby signed the gluey, glittery plate under his pumpkin and told me that, when he was rich and famous, I could sell Rico for a million dollars.


Names, except for those of pirate chicken pumpkins, have been changed.

The Good Vending Machine

Two months into my fellowship at Bethel New Life, and I've finally discovered the good vending machine. I say "good" because there are a number of vending machines on the campus where I work, most out of order and the rest stocked only with generations old snack foods (Andy Capp's Hot Fries? Seriously?). All of a sudden, now, I feel acclimated, like I am finally a part of this organization rather than a timid observer.Perhaps this is not a universal experience for fellows, but for me, things began very slowly; there was so much to pick up on, so much to learn that couldn't be explained in an hour-long orientation. I knew immediately that there were large gaps in my knowledge -- no one told me about Casual Fridays, which department had the best coffee (not mine), and the back exit that gets me to the bus stop two minutes faster. 


But more importantly, in a place like the Westside where there are decades of historical, political, and social factors all still informing the policies and work being done today, it can feel like an overwhelming task to try and match the experience and knowledge of my co-workers, many of whom were born and raised in West Garfield Park. I would be forced to grope blindly for understanding in my first meetings as others talked speedily about local ordinances and political figures, businesses and schools, and, worst of all, the dreaded non-profit acronyms. It felt not only like I didn't have all of the information, but that short of living in the community for the next forty years, I would always be playing catch-up.


But then, I found the good vending machine. It may seem trite, but to me, that discovery signaled a greater shift in my position at Bethel New Life. I realized that I wasn't the new kid anymore, that I recognized faces and understood the nuances of office politics. I had finally learned my way around: I piped up in meetings, floated solutions to problems, decided to work on things that meant something to me rather than waiting for an assignment from a supervisor. This confidence in my place here was formed out of all the things I learned along the way, bits of knowledge stumbled over as I made my way down Bethel New Life's hallways. And, when I have a tough day, I finally know where I can get my hands on some Raisinets.

My First Month at Bethel New Life

By my third week of work on the Westside of Chicago for the community development organization Bethel New Life, I was stringing up a makeshift volleyball net from the pole of a chain-link fence and the sagging limbs of a dead tree. In the backyard of an abandoned house, it’s windows boarded up and bits of its roof’s shingles strewn around in the grass, we were getting a volleyball game together, marking out our boundaries and choosing teams. When I took this job months ago, back in what feels like a different lifetime at Princeton, I never thought that part of my duties would include high-fiving teammates and trash-talking across the net in the shadow of an abandoned building. But now, here I am, four weeks into my life as a Chicagoan, and a lot of my afternoons have become playtime again, sinking plastic battleships and running the nubs of well-worn Crayons across newsprint paper.


I didn't expect for the mentoring program at Bethel New Life to become such a large part of my life here in Chicago, but almost immediately it did. Bethel New Life is an organization that has been working to strengthen the community of West Garfield Park on the Westside of Chicago for thirty years, and in doing so has become recognized as one of the most influential Community Development Corporations in the country. Created in the aftermath of the destruction caused by race riots of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the subsequent loss of population and industry as well as the degradation of community infrastructure, Bethel New Life has become an all-encompassing neighborhood organization, with arms in education, elder care, real estate and asset management, and a number of other community services. When I arrived in Chicago, I imagined that my duties would solely consist of the things that I had studied in college: urban development, architecture, and planning. But the breadth and scope of Bethel New Life's programming has pushed me into areas of work I never would have imagined back when I applied to be a part of P55. Before the end of 2010 (if all goes as planned), I will have helped to create Bethel New Life's flagship Christmas Store (providing new toys, clothes, and food to families during the holidays), been a major contributor to a new urban plan for West Garfield Park's commercial district, and played a few hundred games of Chutes & Ladders.


I don't quite feel at home yet in Chicago (subletting an apartment will have that effect -- it feels like being a squatter in someone else's abandoned home, like at any moment they'll come home and kick you out) but I can feel my life settling into this city and into my work. At first, I had trouble dealing with the many obstacles that come with working in the non-profit world, in a world where state and federal funding is frozen without warning, where some community development is as much powered by the political machine as it is by passion, and where the need absolutely always overwhelms the impact. But Bethel New Life is an inspiring place, and every single person working here has amazed me with their dedication and their commitment to West Garfield Park. Seeing this commitment, and having such amazing experiences with the children of the mentoring program, have made me more idealist than cynic, and have excited me for the possibilities of the coming year.

It has helped tremendously to feel as though I belong here, and that what I'm doing is impacting something larger than me. While non-profit work can often be slow going, mired in bureaucracy and halted by budget restrictions, being a part of the mentoring program at Bethel New Life eases those feelings of frustration. It is nice to know that even if the scope of a project becomes overwhelming, or funding for a program dries up, there is a way for me to still make an impact, today, right now, by being a positive, and constant, force in these kids' lives. Yesterday Ava learned how to bump and serve overhand, and we practiced passing under the telephone lines as the light outside began to fade. Sometimes all you can do is give a high-five and play another point of volleyball, and a lot of times, that's enough.