“Life is cheap in the Third World.” An old friend and I used to share this sentiment back in the days when we studied the concept of development in what we often refer to as the Third World. We looked at high infant mortality rates, lack of access to health care and education and came to this grim conclusion. He was from that part of the world; I had lived in it. We traveled through some of it together and felt some consolation in this reductionist refrain as we dismissed the smudged-faced beggar children who pulled at our pant legs.
After a few days working in my new position with the least likely to succeed in this society, I have to come to the same conclusion about the First World as well, at least the US as part of the First World. Life is cheap here, too. So many of these people around us, even in this country of abundant resources and highly developed infrastructure, are tossed away like rotten meat, forgotten on the garbage heap of wasted human potential, abandoned and dismissed.
Last week I went to a mental health facility for children who have problems with substance abuse; all of the kids there have both a mental disorder and problems with substance abuse. My colleagues took me there, as it’s one of my many sites on my list. They didn’t think I’d have any ESOL students to service, but they said it would be good for me to know what those sites were like. And the place isn’t bad. It’s an old house on fairly spacious grounds with woods in the back. The furniture is a little old and dirty, but not worse than some of the furniture I used in my dorm rooms in college.
The kids came up the stairs from their classroom in the basement for a break while we were there. And, guess what? They seemed like normal kids, helping themselves to water from the refrigerator, joking, talking with each other. I didn’t expect anything different. But somewhere these kids have been given up on, or they wouldn’t be in that home. It turns out I will work with one of them—a young man from
Mexico, I think.
At another mental health site that afternoon, we visited a house that is almost primarily for girls who don’t have a place to live. There was only one resident at the time we visited, an American girl, working on large Matisse-like cutouts. She was using another piece she had colored as a model which had peace symbols on it and a large gravestone that said, “Daddy, Rest in Peace.” She was thin, tall, drawn into herself, and fragile. Those chestnut eyes darted back and forth from the shapes she was cutting to glances at us, the strange visitors. Her teacher kept telling her to rip the cutouts instead of cutting them, and the girl got angry at this (I would have, too!). I just wanted to hug her, tell her it was ok, adopt her, even. We toured the house, where I saw a sun-drenched living area and about seven bedrooms, complete with observation windows with a tiny privacy curtain the staff members could observe with.
Surveillance. A lot of the kids I work with are surveilled—somehow they’ve checked their ability to have autonomy at the door, and the “system” can’t afford to trust them anymore. I guess stealing cars, running away, dealing drugs, recruiting for gangs, and the host of other things they’ve done means they can’t be trusted anymore. But that’s how we treat them… no longer trustworthy. Could we not look back instead and learn what has happened to them to make them this way? There’s always a story. Could we not find ways to mend the brokenness in their hearts, their homes, their communities? Their teachers and counselors, many of them (hopefully most) fight against this in these unwieldy schools and centers where they get tossed, trying to recognizing the light emanating from within them, helping to nurture it. But what happens when they leave these somewhat protective (and surveilling) places and go back to the harsh conditions they started from? Will they be able to nourish that light on their own? Or will they just get tossed back on that garbage heap again later in life, that heap partly comprised of the millions of people we have in our prisons? God only knows, for life is cheap, it seems, wherever you go.
Entries (RSS)