Wednesday, March 28, 2007
The Rabbi and Roman both work with troubled kids, so that's been a topic of conversation this week. Roman's "kids" are in their late teens, and already into gangs and drugs, and many had been court-ordered into the program. There was a frustrating incident Monday that has Roman thinking it's time to quit. I wondered if maybe the county is getting to these kids too late. Aren't there any programs to get to them younger?
When I lived in the St. Louis area, I worked with a police department childrens' program. The staff consisted of a cop and a social worker. The cop was a big Norwegian doofis. Everything went over his head. I think he was selected because he would be nonthreatening. The social worker was a skinny hyper guy in his early twenties who was total hippie (this was 1971-ish), who always carried an aura of lingering marijuana smoke. His girlfriend helped out occasionally. She was spacy, never seemed connected to the here and now. She often wore nothing but a tiny unstructured bikini. When it got wet, the string ties stretched, and the little triangles of the top drooped to her midriff, and she didn't seem to notice or care.
With two males on staff, they decided they needed a female, so I volunteered. I was in at pretty much the start of the program.
The kids were from 11 to maybe 15 years old. They were good kids as far as I could tell, but they came through the juvenile court, as kids who were in danger of falling off the rails. Most of them didn't seem to have much of a home life, no guidance. They were pretty worldly for their age.
The county had acquired a dilapidated old abandoned house in an industrial section of a suburb (non-payment of taxes), and turned it over to us. We put the kids to work renovating it. By the end of the summer it was looking pretty good, with an "Our House" sign over the door. It was a safe and welcoming place the kids could go after school and on weekends, and the kids had a feeling of accomplishment, having "built" it themselves.
We took them on field trips on weekends. The one that stands out in my mind is our first camping trip.
There were several planning meetings. The kids were responsible for most of the decisions. The agreement was that the adults would stay out of it. The question came up about co-ed tents. The cop and I weren't too happy about the idea of cohabitation. The three of us had discussed it earlier, knowing that the subject would come up. It could go three ways: We could establish a basic ground rule (or two, including drugs and alcohol) which would be enforced, we could establish ground rules which we would pretend to enforce, or we could stand back and have no influence whatsoever. The hippie was in favor of no interference, and he was in charge, so that was that.
So when cohabitation came up, of course all the boys and a few of the girls voted to allow it, and that was that.
A few days before the trip, three girls came to me, and asked to speak with me privately. We went into a side room and closed the door. They told me that the boys had divvied up the tents among themselves, and were now divvying up the girls. The girls were under tremendous pressure to agree to share a tent with a boy, and they didn't want to, but didn't know what to do about it. "Bobby wants me to go with him, and if I don't I'm afraid he'll be mad at me."
I told them to pass the word. As many girls as possible should show up tomorrow evening, and we'll have a girls-only meeting, and we'll figure this out. The next night ALL twenty girls showed up. It was great. They discussed it, and they all, no matter how they felt about any particular boy, they all agreed that they didn't like the way they were being pressured, the way they felt they had no choice, and they weren't going to lie down and take it.
We came up with a secret plan.
To the boys they said "How sweet of you to ask, but I can't promise. We'll see what happens."
Comes the camping trip. On arrival at the campground (not an official campground, just a patch of woods), the boys rushed to stake out their territory and set up their tents. I was amused that they all spread out in the woods, far apart from each other and far from the campfire.
The day was filled with building a latrine, games, cooking for 45 over a fire, the usual stuff. Some of the girls gathered leaves and pile needles, which they placed in piles around the fire pit, "to sit on". There was a pond, and some kids decided to go swimming. I was suspicious of the pond - it was rimmed with black mud, always a bad sign, and sure enough it was full of leaches, so that led to some more fun. I was amused that the hippie's girlfriend's bikini top had drooped again, so that her breasts were covered with leaches. She suddenly snapped back to the here and now for a bit.
Late evening, after the hot dogs on sticks and the marshmallows, the boys started dropping hints and heading for their tents. The girls wanted to sit around the fire a little longer. Finally it was just girls. We looked around, and here and there through the woods we could see lonely boys sitting in tent doorways, in the glow of a lantern or candle or flashlight.
One of the girls looked up at the sky, and marveled at how beautiful the stars were. The others chimed in. Someone said how nice it would be to sleep out here, under the stars. Everyone else agreed that was a wonderful idea. They pushed together the piles of leaves and pine needles they had gathered earlier, and covered them with some huge tarps they just happened to have brought "just in case" (we had also brought poles for a canopy in case it rained), and piled on some blankets. All twenty girls slept that night together in a heap, in the middle of camp, under the stars. Not one girl went to a tent.
It was wonderful. I was so proud of them.
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