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Crossing Borders
Volume7, Number 1 - Fall 2008
People & Stories
Creates Circles of Connection -
young readers find community
by Patricia Andres
An informal education program, designed to meet people where they are, People & Stories /Gente y Cuentos uses certain mantras in choosing our program locations. One is from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God: “You gotta go there to know there.” Another is from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the practice of domination—denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from men.”
So when we recently applied to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to strengthen our programs for youth, we were asking for help to meet a need we perceive as crucial for many young people—participation in a community that taps into and develops innate potential, thereby nourishing hope.
This brings another of our mantras to mind: Emily Dickinson’s poem:
“Hope”
is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –And never stops – at all –
The federal government did award People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos a one-time Compassion Capital grant to expand our capacity to serve youth. Just several dozen organizations nationwide, and only a few in New Jersey, garnered the award.
What are we accomplishing?
Here’s a recent moment at Manos House in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where formerly incarcerated youth discussed Catharine Ryan Hyde’s story, “The Man Who Found You in the Woods,” which describes the rebellious behavior of Nat, abandoned at birth by his young mother, then turned over by his grandmother at the age of 15 to the man who found him in the woods as an infant.
A 16-year-old participant said she vividly remembered being abandoned by her mother when she was only two years old. One student noted that the boy continually sabotaged his relationships and acted out as a means to protect himself, because everyone who should have loved him gave up on him. “He couldn’t trust anyone to love him unconditionally and stick with him no matter what he did.”
Participants became involved in a heated debate when asked if Nat would turn his life around because of the loyalty of his new guardian. We don’t mind the loud dialogue; we’re thrilled when students become so excited about reading.
When describing what People & Stories has to offer incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people, including youth, the late Sister Lorette Piper, P&S coordinator and board member in perpetuity, wrote:
“Serious dialogue is a human value, one of the great gifts of life. Participants need and enjoy the humanizing benefits of serious conversation about topics of substantial import in all our lives: People & Stories enlarges horizons, broadens perspectives and helps inmates recognize their connection to a bigger world.”
Youth are at a crossroads; they can become “outsiders,” snatched up by the “community” of gang membership. Let’s do more P&S/GyC sessions with youth to create more circles of belonging, circles where there are no outsiders or insiders, where growing, searching, learning and communing together is enough.