On Tuesday afternoons during the school year I have the opportunity to work as a
volunteer tutor in Kansas City, Kansas. I tutor at Juniper Gardens, a public
housing complex. The residents of Juniper Gardens are a diverse mixture of
people, including recent immigrants who are largely refugees from Sierra Leone,
Somalia, and Nepal. Their commonality is their material poverty. Like all
children, the kids who show up for tutoring have desires for what they want to
be when they grow up. They have many of the same “bouncing off the wall” issues
that my own children have.
During our first session in September, the group who
facilitates the tutoring, The Learning
Club of Kansas City, Kansas, has us go through a questionnaire with the
children we work with. One of the questions they ask is “If you could go
anywhere, where would you go and why do you want to go there?” It’s an
interesting question that gets to the horizons the child has been shown, what
motivates them to go somewhere, and some of their base interests.
The first child I worked with this year is a soft-spoken
child. It took a lot of coaxing to get him to speak up and look at me while he
was talking. This was not unusual for a child his age. When we got to the
question about where he wanted to go, his answer was simply stunning: “I want
to go away from here so I don’t have to be around all of the shooting.” I did
my best to keep my eyes on the paper in front of me to make sure I did not give
away too much of my surprise, my sadness, and my anger. No person should have
to deal with that kind of stress, especially a child.
Having to worry about gunshots is one of the many ways that
being poor is hard. Living in poverty presents daily struggles just to live, to
find work, to be safe, to be healthy, and to have food on the table. All of us
react to the struggles of life in different ways: positively, negatively or
(most often) somewhere in between the two. For people living on the margins,
the difference between living and dying, being free and going to jail,
succeeding and failing is often amazingly thin. They have to have a great deal
of faith and hope to go forward with living.
In the midst of this many people living in these situations
have a deep sense of faith. As Father James Martin, S.J. said in a recent article from America Magazine:
Many are the things we can learn from people with personal experience
of poverty. Many are the experiences that they take for granted that others
would find intolerable. In their patience, in their fortitude, in their dignity
and in their hard work, the poor can often be our models. And so blessed are
they.
This seems to be a common refrain from people who work with
people who are poor. One friend of mine who worked at a food pantry talked
about how deeply faithful many of the people she served were. Most of the
people she worked for were hungry and desperately poor. Many of them would
answer the standard greeting “How are you today?” with the striking answer “I
am blessed.”
