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Volume 6, Number 1 - Fall 2007
NJ Youth Corps Students Shape Words and Lives
by Anndee Hochman
They dedicated their words to the one who wasn’t there.
Kenwania Moses, a 16-year-old Trenton Youth Corps student, died in his sleep last spring. In June, his classmates gathered to celebrate their graduation—in truth, their survival. One by one, they read first-person stories of rage and regret, friendship and hope, stories they wrote in response to literature they had read in People & Stories/ Gente y Cuentos.
Lonnie Houston recalled challenging a racist comment from another African-American. Matt Calhoun described the death of his dog. Ebony Jackson responded to “Marriage Is a Private Affair,” by Chinua Achebe: “Some traditions must be broken because they’re old, and in this time and day make no sense.”
Edith Siplin, director of the Youth Corps program, was impressed. “They were actively engaged” in People & Stories, she said. “They were paying attention. I’m impressed with how much they addressed their own personal issues and tied them into what they had read.”
Alison Stevenson, who facilitated the series, noted the range of responses—some of them unexpected—to stories including “Thank You, M’am” by Langston Hughes, “Two Words” by Isabel Allende and “Homework” by Peter Cameron, the story of a middle-class boy who is despondent after the death of his dog. Some Youth Corps readers had little empathy for that character.
“They said, ‘He just needs to buck up and get over it. What does he have to complain about?’ They see his isolation and depression as being so self-indulgent.”
Another story that sparked heated conversation was “Chin,” by Gish Jen, the tale of a boy who watches as a friend is routinely beaten by his immigrant father. Stevenson asked students whether they had ever tried to intervene in order to help someone. “There wasn’t anyone who didn’t have a story about that.”
Youth Corps participants, who range from 16 to 25, have left school for a range of reasons: academic failure, discipline problems, run-ins with the law, perpetual moves from state to state. They study each morning, working toward their GEDs, and take part in job training—landscaping, emergency medicine, business—in the afternoons. Most complete the program in less than six months, Siplin said. “Our ultimate goal is to prepare them for work.”
Stevenson’s goal was to help them question, write and think. “With the writing, initially, everybody groans and moans,” she recalled. “By week three, they’re not afraid of the process anymore.”
Siplin noted tangible benefits of the program, which was funded by the New Jersey Office of Faith-Based Initiatives; students who took part in People & Stories/ Gente y Cuentos passed the writing component of the GED at a much higher rate than those who did not.
And Stevenson cited the impact that can’t be calculated. “The hope is that, when they leave the program, they will be on more solid ground than when they came.”
She recalled one student, a young woman with a one-year-old baby, who wrote soul-searching pieces about the choices she had made. “She welcomed the chance to reflect on things and connect through writing.
“When I offered a variety of writing prompts, [participants] inevitably chose the ones that were rooted in life experience. Watching them put their own experience into words, both spoken and written, is a very humbling process for me. I have so much admiration for the effort that they have to put into shaping their lives.”