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Yay, she's alive! (or not)
I'm incredibly bored and denying the fact that I have two tests tomorrow....so here is something I wrote for my British Literature and Composition class. We had to write a diary/journal entry about an event involving other people, yet having personal insights in it, too. I liked mine, and it pretty much explains itself, so here it is, supposedly having been written one of the nights I was on the mission trip in Milwaukee:
Thursday, August 14, 2002
Today was a long day, like every other day has been this week. Tomorrow’s our last day here in Milwaukee, and today was our last day handing out meals at the corner. ‘The corner’, as we’ve been calling it, is an empty parking lot full of broken glass. It’s located in one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in Milwaukee. Tuesday night, Wednesday night, and tonight, we handed out meals from the back of a van. Everyone we gave meals to wore the same clothing every day we were with them. Today, we were definitely more fortunate than the first day. The first day, we were out of meals well before we were done serving people, because there was confusion with churches signing up to come with prepared food. The last family to receive meals was a mother with two kids in a stroller and two others walking beside her. All we had to give them were two bags of food. I searched the back of the van three times, convinced that there had to be more for us to give them, but I couldn’t find anything. And of course, after that, we went back to the House of Peace (run by the Franciscan Peacemakers, and the place we were staying), and ate a sickeningly large dinner. It feels so...wrong.
I didn’t cry when we had to say good-bye tonight, but I’m sure I will tomorrow when we say good-bye to the kids at the Bible school. I almost wanted to, though. We brought sidewalk chalk, and the kids covered the parking lot with hop-scotches and flowers and suns. I colored with a lot of the kids, and some of the other girls gave them piggy-back rides around the parking lot while they waited for the food to come. It’s kind of funny...the first night we were there, all the broken glass scared me, and I thought it was dangerous, but tonight I would have been comfortable walking around barefoot. I spent a lot of time coloring with a little girl with a straight afro. Like the hair on those trolls with the neon hair. The church that provided the meals also brought a bunch of books and handed them out to the kids, probably not realizing that a lot of them couldn’t read. The little girl with troll-hair had a sizable stack, and after she ate, I watched her toddle away with her mother...and twelve or so brothers and sisters.
One of the girls I came down with said that she was talking with a little boy at the corner who couldn’t have been more than four. And he was telling her that he didn’t understand why when he went to preschool, girls and boys didn’t talk to each other, or white people and black people, or rich kids and poor kids. He said it didn’t make any sense, because everybody ‘had nice’ in them. And then he declared, “I’m just hungry, but I gots nice in me, too!” When the girl shared that with us, I wanted to cry. A four-year-old child can say something so insightful, and yet there are people back home who say things like, “Why the hell can’t they just get a job?” Hey, you try getting a job if you have kids. If you don’t have money, you can’t pay for anyone to watch your kids while you work, but you can’t get money unless someone’s taking care of your kids. And even if you manage to get a job and barely pay your rent and the cost of food, diapers, and clothing for your children, it doesn’t mean you can pay for health insurance or life insurance or car insurance, let alone a car. What happens if someone in your family gets sick? There’s no way you can cover the cost of medical bills, or the cost of medicine. I don’t think anybody back home realizes how lucky all of us are, and it makes me sad. Because I’ll go back, and no matter how hard I try to explain how I feel, nobody will understand, if they even care. It’s a hard thing to make others aware unless they actually go there and immerse themselves in it. It’s sad, though, that some people are so judgmental and unsympathetic. I never really got the point of being that kind of person.
Yeah, I know, I just had to throw that little social injustice thing in there, but people infuriate me sometimes. Alright, I'll go study Spanish now....maybe I'll put more cool stuff in here over my four days off for Thanksgiving?? We'll see, ^_~
Thursday, August 14, 2002
Today was a long day, like every other day has been this week. Tomorrow’s our last day here in Milwaukee, and today was our last day handing out meals at the corner. ‘The corner’, as we’ve been calling it, is an empty parking lot full of broken glass. It’s located in one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in Milwaukee. Tuesday night, Wednesday night, and tonight, we handed out meals from the back of a van. Everyone we gave meals to wore the same clothing every day we were with them. Today, we were definitely more fortunate than the first day. The first day, we were out of meals well before we were done serving people, because there was confusion with churches signing up to come with prepared food. The last family to receive meals was a mother with two kids in a stroller and two others walking beside her. All we had to give them were two bags of food. I searched the back of the van three times, convinced that there had to be more for us to give them, but I couldn’t find anything. And of course, after that, we went back to the House of Peace (run by the Franciscan Peacemakers, and the place we were staying), and ate a sickeningly large dinner. It feels so...wrong.
I didn’t cry when we had to say good-bye tonight, but I’m sure I will tomorrow when we say good-bye to the kids at the Bible school. I almost wanted to, though. We brought sidewalk chalk, and the kids covered the parking lot with hop-scotches and flowers and suns. I colored with a lot of the kids, and some of the other girls gave them piggy-back rides around the parking lot while they waited for the food to come. It’s kind of funny...the first night we were there, all the broken glass scared me, and I thought it was dangerous, but tonight I would have been comfortable walking around barefoot. I spent a lot of time coloring with a little girl with a straight afro. Like the hair on those trolls with the neon hair. The church that provided the meals also brought a bunch of books and handed them out to the kids, probably not realizing that a lot of them couldn’t read. The little girl with troll-hair had a sizable stack, and after she ate, I watched her toddle away with her mother...and twelve or so brothers and sisters.
One of the girls I came down with said that she was talking with a little boy at the corner who couldn’t have been more than four. And he was telling her that he didn’t understand why when he went to preschool, girls and boys didn’t talk to each other, or white people and black people, or rich kids and poor kids. He said it didn’t make any sense, because everybody ‘had nice’ in them. And then he declared, “I’m just hungry, but I gots nice in me, too!” When the girl shared that with us, I wanted to cry. A four-year-old child can say something so insightful, and yet there are people back home who say things like, “Why the hell can’t they just get a job?” Hey, you try getting a job if you have kids. If you don’t have money, you can’t pay for anyone to watch your kids while you work, but you can’t get money unless someone’s taking care of your kids. And even if you manage to get a job and barely pay your rent and the cost of food, diapers, and clothing for your children, it doesn’t mean you can pay for health insurance or life insurance or car insurance, let alone a car. What happens if someone in your family gets sick? There’s no way you can cover the cost of medical bills, or the cost of medicine. I don’t think anybody back home realizes how lucky all of us are, and it makes me sad. Because I’ll go back, and no matter how hard I try to explain how I feel, nobody will understand, if they even care. It’s a hard thing to make others aware unless they actually go there and immerse themselves in it. It’s sad, though, that some people are so judgmental and unsympathetic. I never really got the point of being that kind of person.
Yeah, I know, I just had to throw that little social injustice thing in there, but people infuriate me sometimes. Alright, I'll go study Spanish now....maybe I'll put more cool stuff in here over my four days off for Thanksgiving?? We'll see, ^_~