Week 12
1055 words by bee0702
Despite a rough start, my project is now coming along quite well. My Friday night tutoring sessions have been a big hit in the neighborhood near my church, which is part of Algiers, and I keep getting kids who want to participate, even this late in the school year, I think that it may be parents who are forcing them, but at least they are participating and getting tutored. Some of the kids actually wanted me to have another tutoring day, besides Friday, so that they can receive additional help. I plan to work on that over the summer and plan to have in place for next school year. Parents have asked if I would have LEAP tutoring for next year, but I would have to look into that. Parents have also asked if there would be a summer camp, but I am not sure if the church would go for that. I am also not sure if there would be enough people to staff a camp type project. I have a few people helping me now but I still would have to work over the summer and I am not sure who I would have in my place when I am not there.
We also have a clean-up activity on Sunday, April 1st. As a group, we went to a park in the neighborhood and cleaned it up a bit. There were about nine kids who participated and since the park was a five minute walk from the church, we did not have to arrange for transportation. I did have the parents sign a waiver agreeing that they were aware of the activity and gave contacts in the case of an emergency. We met at the church at one in the afternoon and returned to the church around three. I had 3 people assisting me and we provided drinks and snacks for the children. The trash bags and other cleaning equipment were provided by the caretaker of the park, who also lives in the neighborhood. We did buy the children gloves, masks if they needed them, hand sanitizer, paper towels and other necessities.
When we arrived at the park, the kids were actually eager to clean up, which shocked me since they were relatively young, ages six to ten. The older kids did not want to participate in this event. We met the caretaker at the park and he supplied us with trash bags, brooms, and a few hoes. The kids picked up trash and other debris for about thirty minutes, and then one yelled put that he was tired and needed snacks. And then everyone needed a snack. So it was snack time. I only meant for the snack time to last, at most, fifteen minutes. But the kids wanted to sit and rest, making snack time last almost thirty minutes. Finally I got them back on task and they worked intermittently until about two forty-five. Then we had to gather all the bags and materials together so that we could give them to the park caretaker. He offered to dispose of the trash for us and we happily obliged. We left the park and returned to the park about five minutes after three. This is a picture of debris similar to what we had to pick up in the park clean up.
Overall, I think it was a great day. There was no rain and the weather was nice. I didn’t really have a problem with any of the kids. A few kept getting side-tracked, but no real troublemakers. I did have to wait an extra 20 minutes for one kid’s parent to pick them up, but I guess that’s to be expected. I just hope some of these parents do not perceive this youth group as a babysitting service. We are planning to go to the Strawberry Festival in Ponchatoula, LA on April 14. It is an annual event and should be a fun occasion. I have already got one of the adults in the church to drive us there in the church van and I hope that no more that ten kids sign up to go because it will be a lot of work keeping up with all of them, even with two assistants. When I asked how many of the kids had been at the last tutoring session, none had. Many of these kids had not even left Louisiana before Hurricane Katrina. So I hope to give them a new outlook on our state and that bayou culture.
My project is counter-cultural because, right now, children are not encouraged to go outside and be as active as generations had before. Our culture involves video games and computer technology. Yes, it keeps kids out of trouble outside but they are still just sitting on their butts all day. And we have seen the types of dangers that can come from children being on the internet. What I am trying to do is take the youth from in front the computer screen and television, and put them out into the open and get kids back active in their community.
Jesus was counter-cultural because he spoke about issues and ideals that were opposite of society’s way of thinking back then. In a time where there were frequent wars and a constant struggle for power and wealth, Jesus was saying to love your enemies and to not put your faith into material things. That was not what people wanted to hear in ancient biblical times, and it certainly was taboo to go against the grain. Jesus was so counter-cultural that he was ultimately executed for it. While we are much more tolerant than in the past, in biblical times, tolerance appeared to be a rarity. Jesus is a symbol for things that are counter-cultural. His entire message to the people of biblical times was to change how they had been doing things. And that is never something that is taken lightly. It is comparable to when you try to tell an elderly person to stop doing something that they have been doing for “fifty years” or more. It’s not an easy task, but it was what Jesus preached about.