sorry for the delay, here is what has been going on with building blocks. We have our first formal meeting with the residents tonight, so wish me luck :). I will write about it soon.
Since we decided to wait a week to hold our first meeting, early this week Sarah, Sam and I were back to door-knocking. We headed to Bellaire Street around 10 am on Tuesday, hoping to get in contact with several people we still had not met. Unfortunately, we did not meet anyone we hadn’t already talked with. As we were heading back to the car, Sam and I decided to try knocking on Mary’s door again. Mary, a middle-aged Hispanic, was in the middle of dinner when we knocked on her door last week and was not happy to be interrupted. We thought that since she has a young son, Javier, she would be up at 10 am. This assumption was further carried by the muted cries of a toddler emerging from the house. Although I was hesitant to interrupt Mary when she was trying to calm Javier, Sam thought that his would be one of our only times to talk with her so we knocked on the door. There was no answer. I knocked again, louder. Still no answer. As we were walking away from Mary’s home, Sam noticed a side door and knocked on it. No one answered. Confused and frustrated, we continued toward Sarah’s car, but a couple of seconds later, the side door to Mary’s home opened. Our assumptions were wrong. We had awoken Mary and again tried to talk with her at a very inopportune time. She asked us to come back another time.
As we walked up the second block on Bellaire Street, we noticed a woman sitting on her front porch. Sarah had already talked with her husband and he had sounded somewhat interested. We decided this would not only be a good opportunity to remind her about the meeting, but also for her to meet Sam and I (one of the downsides to the way we approached door-knocking is that half of Bellaire Street is very familiar with Sam and me and the other half is very familiar with Sarah). The woman, a Caucasian in her mid-50’s, introduced herself as Suzanne and to our surprise had seen the flier on the kitchen counter and was very excited about coming to our first meeting. She was watching her grandchildren for Spring Break but ushered us into her backyard to show us her ornamental grasses. The first thing that I noticed about Suzanne was how willing she was to share things with people. Not only did she immediately show complete strangers the garden she took so much pride in, but she soon started asking us if we would like some of her hostas or ebony mambo grass. If not, she suggested that she could donate some to the other neighbors participating in Building Blocks. Her garden was beautiful; the entire back yard had been transformed into a haven overflowing with last summer’s remnants of grasses, tomatoes, and flowers. Overhead, wind chimes and bird feeders crisscrossed on twine strung between her house and the trees. Stone paths wound throughout and there was a prominent strawberry patch that Suzanne was quite proud of. We continued to chat with her while her grandchildren chased each other with super-soakers and soon delved into deeper conversation.
Suzanne, like many Bellaire Street residents, works third shift and has been working at the same factory for around 25 years. She works in manufacturing and is very keen that she is working in a ‘man’s world’. She has apparently been in training for shift manager for a very long time but never actually gets promoted, to her frustration. Her husband injured his back in his previous manufacturing job and so is now unable to work. I think that Suzanne is very proud of the fact that she is now supporting her and her husband on her income. A couple of years ago, Suzanne decided to get her GED. She recounted for us how wonderful it was when she realized she “was the smart one”, not her husband and the he really couldn’t push her around anymore. It seems like Suzanne’s relationship with her husband has changed a lot over the years, from him basically supporting her and she in turn fulfilling a traditional role of housewife, to Suzanne entirely supporting him with an amazingly strong sense of self.
As we turned the conversation back to building blocks, Suzanne began to tell her who, from her perspective, would participate. She first talked about some of the homeowners. Especially those who like her had lived in the neighborhood for a long time. She stressed how they wanted to take care of their homes, although sometimes there was not enough money to do it properly. When we told her of some of the other people who had shown interest in the program, she seemed surprised. “But they’re renters”, she claimed. “They don’t care about their homes.” We gently suggested that just because they are renters doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t want to upkeep their homes and Suzanne agreed that she liked Sophie Perez, a renter across the street. Sophie is a single mom and often uses Suzanne for support and advice. I think Suzanne enjoys helping Sophie because she wants Sophie to survive as a strong, self-sufficient woman. Suzanne, however, was initially not interested in meeting the renters next door to her. “They don’t care about their home,” she said, “and they keep me up playing loud music all the time.” We told her that in fact they were interested in the program, too and that maybe this would be a good opportunity for Suzanne to talk with them, get to know them better and let them know that their music bothers her. “Yeah, I will show them the wrath of Suzanne,” Suzanne responded. Yikes! That was not quite what I had in mind. I think we will have to carefully watch how Suzanne interacts with some of the renters. She is very clear and upfront and I think could upset some of her neighbors with her preconceptions of them.
Thursday afternoon, Sam and I returned to Bellaire Street to try and catch up with some people we were unable to meet on Tuesday. To our surprise, our visit was very successful. We thought that since we got there around 6 pm everyone would be eating dinner and that we would be interrupting them. However, we met Greg’s wife, Sue’s daughter, Amy’s husband, and Chris Briggs. We had never met Greg or his wife because they were apparently on vacation in Cancun. Sally, his wife, had received our flier as well as talked with May Willie and was quite excited about the first meeting. Both Sally and Greg are African American, pTomably in their mid-40’s, and have two teenage children. When Sam first spoke with Sue (a young African American single mom), she barely opened the door; she seemed very frightened. We spoke with her teenage daughter on Thursday, who was babysitting her brothers and sisters. She seemed like a very responsible person for being so young. She often takes care of her siblings and is very involved in running her home. She and her mom had been whether or not to participate in Building Blocks over dinner. She promised us she would try and convince her mom to come to our meeting. Amy (Caucasian, mid-30’s) was initially very tentative about participating because she works 3rd shift and was concerned about the time commitment but her husband, John (Caucasian, mid-30’s), had seen the flier on the table and was very excited about coming to the meeting. Chris Briggs, an middle aged African American with two teenage children and married to a Caucasian woman, was very excited about the first meeting. He mentioned several times how he and the neighbors across the street were planning on coming together. It was exciting to see neighbors pressuring each other to get involved. He also initially said that he knew all his neighbors really well because of his kids. Chris lives on the side of Bellaire Street closest to the stream and when we mentioned Andrew and some other kids who lived on the other block, asking if his kids played with them, Chris quickly retorted, “no. We don’t really associate with the people up there. We stick to our own street and they stick to theirs.” I hadn’t really noticed before, but there did seem to be a distinct separation between the two blocks. The kids who knew each other so well and constantly played outside on one block never ventured to the next block. I hadn’t ever seen kids on Chris’s block (except Elizabeth’s). I think that one of our big tasks will be joining these two blocks together more, especially when it comes to working on houses. I think there might be a tendency for people to work only on homes on their own block; both due to this separation and that those houses will be physically closer.
Despite our successful attempts at door-knocking this week, some frustrating things happened, too. I am the coordinator of donations, so I asked several bakeries if they would be willing to donate day-old baked goods to our first meeting. I was unilaterally disappointed. The first store I went to was Kleins, since I know they donate their bagels to Kalamazoo College and have donated to Building Blocks in the past. The manager there that day said that in fact they now donate only to children’s charities and Loaves and Fishes. I think I should go back and talk with a different manager, but it was nevertheless disappointing. I felt like he wasn’t being completely honest with me. I also tried to solicit donations from Panera Bread, since I heard they were also very generous to Building Blocks in the past. There, the manager was very helpful, but said that I would need to contact their corporate headquarters and that the requests could take up to eight weeks. I was talking to my roommate, Jess Walsh, about my frustrations and she suggested that I draft a letter on Edison Neighborhood Association letterhead and get Tom and Pat and maybe ever Terry to sign it. I think that was a really good suggestion, because by myself I really have no credibility so I can see why companies would be wary of agreeing to donations without any proof that I am representing a non-profit organization.
The last rather frustration part of the week was Tom canceling our meeting where we were going to form an agenda for our first meeting. He told us he would e-mail us if he couldn’t make the meeting, but no one had received anything from him yet. About an hour before we were supposed to meet, I tried to call Sam to remind her about the meeting and set up another time to go door-knocking. I accidentally dialed Tom’s number instead and after I realized I was not in fact talking to Sam, he told me that he would have to cancel the meeting. He was very apologetic and I completely understand that he has a really busy schedule, too. I just wish he had let us know a little earlier. I don’t know when he would have told us if I hadn’t misdialed Sam’s phone number and reached him, instead.
Thursday, April 14, 2005
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
my brother is amazing
check out this front page article in the Living section of the Oregonian on the underground newspaper my brother started after being fired as editor of his high-school newspaper :)
http://www.oregonlive.com/living/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/living/1113300166252820.xml
http://www.oregonlive.com/living/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/living/1113300166252820.xml
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
sky dance
Last night, after I got off of work, I rode my bicycle out to the arboretum to see a a woodcock dance. I was really worried that I would get there after he had finished and miss the spectacular display, but as I walked up to the meadow where I thought he would be, I could here his chirping. I sat there for about half an hour before he started to dance and then watched his dance for at least an hour and a half. It was very dark (10:30) when I finished the trip home, but it was totally worth it. Because I cannot explain (without a very embarassing demonstration) what happens during this dance, here is an exerpt from Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (a much more eloquent description then I would be capable of):
I owned my farm for two years before learning that the sky dance is to be seen over my woods every evening in April and May. Since we discovered it, my family and I have been reluctant to miss even a single performance.
The show begins on the first warm evening in April at exactly 6:50 pm. The curtain goes up one minute later each day until 1 June when the time is 7:50. This sliding scale is dictated by vanity, the dancer demanding a romantic light intensity of exactly 0.05 foot candles. Do not be late, and sit quietly, lest he fly away in a huff.
The stage props, like the opening hours, reflect the temperamental demands of the performer. The stage must be an open amphitheater in woods or brush, and in its center there must be a mossy spot, a streak of sterile sand, a bare outcrop of rock, or a bare roadway. Why the male woodcock should be such a stickler for a bare dance floor puzzled me at first, but I now think it is a matter of legs. The woodcock's legs are short and his struttings cannot be executed to advantage in dense grass or weeds, nor could his lady see them there. I have more woodcocks than most farmers because I have more mossy sand, too poor to support grass.
Knowing the place and the hour, you can seat yourself under a bush to the east of the dance floor and wait, watching against the sunset for the woodcock's arrival. He flies in low from some neighboring thicket, alights on the bare moss, and at once begins the overture: a series of queer throaty peents spaced about two seconds apart, and sounding much like the summer call of the nighthawk.
Suddenly the peenting ceases and the bird flutters skyward in a series of wide spirals, emitting a musical twitter. Up and up he goes, the spirals steeper and smaller, the twittering louder and louder, until the performer is only a speck in the sky. Then, without warning, he tumbles like a crippled plane, giving voice in a soft liquid warble that a March bluebird might envy. At a few feet from the ground he levels off and returns to his peenting ground, usually to the exact spot where the performance began, and there resumes his peenting.
It is soon too dark to see the bird on the ground, but you can see his fight against the sky for an hour, which is the usual duration of the show. On moonlight nights, however, it may continue, at intervals, as long as the moon continues to shine.
At daybreak the whole show is repeated. In early April the final curtain falls at 5:15 am; the time advances two minutes a day until June, when the performance closes for the year at 3:15. Why the disparity in sliding scale? Alas, I fear that even romance tires, for it takes only a fifth as much light to stop the sky dance at dawn as suffices to start it at sunset.
It is fortunate, perhaps, that no matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all of the salient facts about any one of them. What I do not yet know about the sky dance is: where is the lady, and just what part, if any, does she play? I often see two woodcocks on a peenting ground, and the two sometimes fly together, but they never peent together. Is the second bird the hen or rival male?
Another unknown: is the twitter vocal, or is it mechanical? My friend, Bill Fenney, once clapped a net over a peenting bird and removed is outer primary wing feathers; thereafter it peented and warbled, but twittered no more. But one such experiment is hardly conclusive.
Another unknown: up to what stage of nesting does the male continue the sky dance? My daughter once saw a bird peenting within twenty yards of a nest containing hatched eggshells, but was this his lady's nest? Or is this secretive fellow possibly bigamous without our ever having found it out? These, and many other questions, remain mysteries of the deepening dusk.
The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They life on the land, but not by the land.
The woodcock is a living refutation of the theory that the utility of a game bird is to serve as a target, or to pose gracefully on a slice of toast. No one would rather hunt woodcock in October than I, but since learning of the sky dance I find myself calling one or two bird enough. I must be sure that come April, there be no dearth of dancers in the sunset sky.
My friend Reid and I are riding back to the arboretum tomorrow night because his dance is rather addicting. We are going to try and hide in the bushes next to where he peens so we can be very close to him.
Did I mention yet that for my vertebrate biology class our first assignment is to memorize 50 bird calls and about 12 frog calls and that we go to the arboretum at dawn on saturdays to go bird watching? It's pretty much the coolist thing in the world. Now when I walk around campus or through the woods I have a completely different experience because I pay so much more attention to the sounds that are present. It still baffles my mind that sometimes I can identify them. I love biology!
I owned my farm for two years before learning that the sky dance is to be seen over my woods every evening in April and May. Since we discovered it, my family and I have been reluctant to miss even a single performance.
The show begins on the first warm evening in April at exactly 6:50 pm. The curtain goes up one minute later each day until 1 June when the time is 7:50. This sliding scale is dictated by vanity, the dancer demanding a romantic light intensity of exactly 0.05 foot candles. Do not be late, and sit quietly, lest he fly away in a huff.
The stage props, like the opening hours, reflect the temperamental demands of the performer. The stage must be an open amphitheater in woods or brush, and in its center there must be a mossy spot, a streak of sterile sand, a bare outcrop of rock, or a bare roadway. Why the male woodcock should be such a stickler for a bare dance floor puzzled me at first, but I now think it is a matter of legs. The woodcock's legs are short and his struttings cannot be executed to advantage in dense grass or weeds, nor could his lady see them there. I have more woodcocks than most farmers because I have more mossy sand, too poor to support grass.
Knowing the place and the hour, you can seat yourself under a bush to the east of the dance floor and wait, watching against the sunset for the woodcock's arrival. He flies in low from some neighboring thicket, alights on the bare moss, and at once begins the overture: a series of queer throaty peents spaced about two seconds apart, and sounding much like the summer call of the nighthawk.
Suddenly the peenting ceases and the bird flutters skyward in a series of wide spirals, emitting a musical twitter. Up and up he goes, the spirals steeper and smaller, the twittering louder and louder, until the performer is only a speck in the sky. Then, without warning, he tumbles like a crippled plane, giving voice in a soft liquid warble that a March bluebird might envy. At a few feet from the ground he levels off and returns to his peenting ground, usually to the exact spot where the performance began, and there resumes his peenting.
It is soon too dark to see the bird on the ground, but you can see his fight against the sky for an hour, which is the usual duration of the show. On moonlight nights, however, it may continue, at intervals, as long as the moon continues to shine.
At daybreak the whole show is repeated. In early April the final curtain falls at 5:15 am; the time advances two minutes a day until June, when the performance closes for the year at 3:15. Why the disparity in sliding scale? Alas, I fear that even romance tires, for it takes only a fifth as much light to stop the sky dance at dawn as suffices to start it at sunset.
It is fortunate, perhaps, that no matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all of the salient facts about any one of them. What I do not yet know about the sky dance is: where is the lady, and just what part, if any, does she play? I often see two woodcocks on a peenting ground, and the two sometimes fly together, but they never peent together. Is the second bird the hen or rival male?
Another unknown: is the twitter vocal, or is it mechanical? My friend, Bill Fenney, once clapped a net over a peenting bird and removed is outer primary wing feathers; thereafter it peented and warbled, but twittered no more. But one such experiment is hardly conclusive.
Another unknown: up to what stage of nesting does the male continue the sky dance? My daughter once saw a bird peenting within twenty yards of a nest containing hatched eggshells, but was this his lady's nest? Or is this secretive fellow possibly bigamous without our ever having found it out? These, and many other questions, remain mysteries of the deepening dusk.
The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They life on the land, but not by the land.
The woodcock is a living refutation of the theory that the utility of a game bird is to serve as a target, or to pose gracefully on a slice of toast. No one would rather hunt woodcock in October than I, but since learning of the sky dance I find myself calling one or two bird enough. I must be sure that come April, there be no dearth of dancers in the sunset sky.
My friend Reid and I are riding back to the arboretum tomorrow night because his dance is rather addicting. We are going to try and hide in the bushes next to where he peens so we can be very close to him.
Did I mention yet that for my vertebrate biology class our first assignment is to memorize 50 bird calls and about 12 frog calls and that we go to the arboretum at dawn on saturdays to go bird watching? It's pretty much the coolist thing in the world. Now when I walk around campus or through the woods I have a completely different experience because I pay so much more attention to the sounds that are present. It still baffles my mind that sometimes I can identify them. I love biology!
Sunday, April 03, 2005
building blocks, first week
*all names and places have been changed to protect the identity of the residents*
Building blocks is a grant program set up by the cisty of Kalamazoo and a class I am taking this quarter teaches organizing skills through facilitation of this program. What follows is an account of some of my experiences the first week:
After experiencing my group’s interactions with our supervisor at the training session, I realized I was going to have to speak up a lot more. Sarah and Sam both have really strong personalities and I felt like they really dominated our introductory conversation with Tom. At first I think I felt a little excluded because Sarah and Sam already knew each other quite well and tended to have very personal conversations to which I didn’t feel I could contribute much. On Sunday night, the night before our first actual meeting with Tom, I decided to make a conscious effort to make an equal contribution to our conversation. I planned out how I would respond to different scenarios and felt pretty confident, but the next day as I sat in Rocket Cafe trying to take a more active role in the conversation I remembered that planning is much easier than executing. Sarah and Sam were both sitting on the same side of the table so I changed where I was sitting so Tom didn’t have to look in a different direction to make eye contact with me and then I just started talking, even if occasionally I was interjecting something Sam or Sarah was saying. Although it was very awkward for me at first to have to work so hard to remain a part of the dialogue, by the end of our conversation, I felt like I was making an equal contribution with very little effort. I think that changing my seat at the table really helped.
Most of the dialogue at our meeting focused around the flier we would hand out in our neighborhood. I think we all thought the meeting would be pretty short because we were just going to construct a one-page flier. However, we ended up sitting at Rocket Cafe for a couple of hours and getting to know each other more between composing the flier. After much discussion about specific wording and formatting, we came up with a flier that I think we were all excited about. It allowed people to quickly discern the purpose of building blocks and the steps they would need to take to participate without overly emphasizing the monetary aspect. We learned a lot more about Tom at our meeting as well. He has been a supervisor several times for building blocks and participated in the program several years ago. Right now he is unemployed so he feels like he can spend a lot of time as the supervisor, but he is very concerned that we will agree to complete projects that cannot be completed during the work weekends and that he will ultimately end up finishing them himself after the work weekends. I think that because of his experience Tom will be a wonderful asset for us as challenges present themselves. However, Tom also is very clear about what he wont do. He really does not want to work on any eaves troughs nor does he want to support any projects in the back yards of houses. I think that his experience has caused him to be slightly less receptive to innovative ways of attacking problems.
During our meeting at Rocket Cafe, we came up with two days to go door-knocking in our neighborhood during the next week since we had to get our flier approved on Thursday at the neighborhood association meeting. Only one of the times would be before second week. However, after class on Monday night, we all agreed that we should add another session before our next class. We tentatively agreed that we would wait until after our third attempt at door-knocking together to go out to Bellaire St. individually. I was relieved that we were planning more than two door-knocking attempts because it seemed like we were waiting a long time to start the process and that we could easily fall behind schedule. I was also a little worried about Tom’s willingness to accompany us door-knocking. I wasn’t sure how much he planned on participating in our door-knocking and I didn’t think I would be comfortable with him talking to residents when we first met them because I understood that as my responsibility as a student. Sarah, Sam, and I decided that we would talk to Tom about guidelines when we me to start door-knocking.
On Thursday, we had a joint meeting with the neighborhood association and the other groups working in the Hoover neighborhood. The meeting was really helpful in clarifying some of the confusing aspects of the policies of Hoover’s neighborhood association. We learned an interesting lesson on classifying people, too: two Hoover residents at the neighborhood got in a pretty heated discussion about the ‘kinds of people’ that live in Hoover. In suggesting that we also identify ourselves as Kalamazoo College students, one resident generalized all Hoover residents as ‘poor and proud’ and thus not likely to accept handouts from wealthy donors in the city. She used herself as an example, saying that she initially participated in building blocks because she thought it would help her student organizers earn class credit. However, another person at the meeting corrected her, saying that many residents of Hoover are well-educated and not very poor and choose to live there because the like the homes and the proximity to downtown. It was interesting to listen to their conversation because they didn’t seem to want to acknowledge that both people could coexist in Hoover.
That afternoon, it was a really nice day outside and I was feeling guilty about not having seen Bellaire St. yet so I rode my bike to Hoover and made a couple of loops up and down the two blocks that encompass our site. Although it was a warm sunny day, it was also a weekday and one of the things that struck me the most was the number of people who were outside. The only residents I saw were African American and there were a lot of kids playing in the street. Tom told us on Monday that most of the houses were one-story bungalows so I wasn’t expecting as many two-story homes. A stream flows perpendicular to one end of the court, there was one empty lot near the stream and many of the homes close to the stream were for sale. The top story of one of the homes on that block had burned in a fire and no one appeared to live there. The site was a lot more beautiful than I had expected it to be; the homes possessed a friendly character, I think because they were all close to the street, and the atmosphere on the street seemed more friendly than the atmosphere on Reed, the street I rode in on. I left the neighborhood really excited about door-knocking on Saturday.
Saturday afternoon we met Tom in the Hardings parking lot a block away from our site. We were all really embarrassed about arriving late, but Tom was very understanding; apparently he was late, too but had the good fortune to arrive a few minutes before us. To our surprise, before we could talk about the guidelines we wanted to set for door-knocking, Tom made it clear that he was just there to walk down the street and that he would not be talking to the residents. As we were walking to one end or Bellaire St. to start knocking on doors, we were stopped by Greg and Grant in between their two houses. They asked us what we were up to so we decided to talk to them first. I was caught off guard a little so I sort of fumbled my way through an explanation of building blocks but they were both kind enough to listen to me. Between jokes about the huge additions they wanted to add to their already massive houses, they told us they were very interested in the program. Their homes seemed to be the center of much of the activity in the neighborhood and their were several kids playing basketball in front of their homes. It turned out that Greg doesn’t actually live on Bellaire St. but that his two kids, Lashonda and a young boy, do. Grant lives with his mom in the house next door and they seemed to be pretty good friends. They also seemed to be pretty knowledgeable about their neighbors on Bellaire St. and were telling us about the people who lived around them. One of the first things I noticed was their view toward Hispanics. As we were knocking on another door, someone yelled to Sarah and me, “Some Mexicans live there, I don’t think they’re home”. I guess it wasn’t the comment itself but rather the way they emphasized Mexicans that made me take a second look at the block. Everyone who was outside was African American, even though Hoover has a reputation of having a large Hispanic population. As we continued knocking on doors, we met several Hispanic households, some with children, but they all stayed safely inside their houses. Javier and Jose came outside to talk with us but refused to leave their porch as we talked about possible landscaping projects. I noticed the same trend with the few Caucasian families we met. Julie, an elderly Caucasian woman, invited us inside her home to talk before she even knew who we were. Between the squeaks of her rabbit, the squawking of her bird and the soft spinning of her hamster’s wheel; she lamented that her grandchildren used to play outside all the time but that a long time ago the kids moved away and new people moved in and now she doesn’t really go outside anymore. She has two grandchildren who live with her as well and who are close in age to many of the kids we saw playing in the street but when her great-grandson did venture outside on his bike, he didn’t seem to want to interact with any of the kids who were already playing. From our conversation with Margaret, it seems like there may have been a large change in the racial composition of the neighborhood in the last 30 years or so from predominantly Caucasian to predominantly Hispanic and African American.
Sunday afternoon, Sarah, Sam and I headed back to Bellaire St., this time without Tom. There were people we needed to meet for the first time and others we needed to give more information to. As we began to walk down the street, Andrew ran up to us to say hello. We only managed to knock on one door before we were again drawn to Grant and Greg’s homes. This time, we met May Greg, Greg’s mom and the owner of the home where Greg’s kids live. She was very excited about the prospect of getting help to improve her yard as well as getting to know the few neighbors she has not already met. Every car that drove past Bellaire St. while we chatted with May somehow contained passengers who were related to her. She has met almost everyone on the block, although she doesn’t know many of their names. May seems like a very valuable resource because she is so well connected in the neighborhood. She was able to tell us the daily schedules of most of our neighbors and offered to give them fliers and talk about the program when she saw them. Despite the length of time we spent with May, we were unable to divulge any broader issues that she was worried about with her neighborhood because of how distracted she was with visitors. We are going to talk with her more on Tuesday and hopefully we will be able to have a more personal conversation with her. We knocked on the door of the next house on our list an again no one answered. We were about to give up when Sarah noticed some people working in the backyard. After we explained who we were to a teenage boy we met an amazing woman, Janet. It turned out that Janet actually lives on Bank St. and is planning on participating in building blocks in that site. Through our conversation, we discovered that she has epilepsy and MS, and possibly some other serious illnesses. Her husband is currently unemployed because he injured his hands and although they get workers compensation, they have $175 each month to live on after they pay for the rent on their house. They also have 8 children. Because her top priority is caring for her children, Janet has not been able to afford her medication for the past three days and is in a lot of pain. Despite this, she is spending the afternoon with her kids working in her neighbor’s yard. She mentioned her illnesses and the fact that she has no refrigerator, microwave or oven and only two functional burners on her stove casually; as side notes. What she was really worried about was finishing her work on her neighbor’s yard before she was in too much pain to continue. Inspired by Aditi’s visit yesterday, she had started cleaning her yard; an effort that quickly expanded into other yards as well. I was really amazed at how intent Janet was on maintaining her social capital with her neighbors in the face of the extreme financial challenges she is facing.
Building blocks is a grant program set up by the cisty of Kalamazoo and a class I am taking this quarter teaches organizing skills through facilitation of this program. What follows is an account of some of my experiences the first week:
After experiencing my group’s interactions with our supervisor at the training session, I realized I was going to have to speak up a lot more. Sarah and Sam both have really strong personalities and I felt like they really dominated our introductory conversation with Tom. At first I think I felt a little excluded because Sarah and Sam already knew each other quite well and tended to have very personal conversations to which I didn’t feel I could contribute much. On Sunday night, the night before our first actual meeting with Tom, I decided to make a conscious effort to make an equal contribution to our conversation. I planned out how I would respond to different scenarios and felt pretty confident, but the next day as I sat in Rocket Cafe trying to take a more active role in the conversation I remembered that planning is much easier than executing. Sarah and Sam were both sitting on the same side of the table so I changed where I was sitting so Tom didn’t have to look in a different direction to make eye contact with me and then I just started talking, even if occasionally I was interjecting something Sam or Sarah was saying. Although it was very awkward for me at first to have to work so hard to remain a part of the dialogue, by the end of our conversation, I felt like I was making an equal contribution with very little effort. I think that changing my seat at the table really helped.
Most of the dialogue at our meeting focused around the flier we would hand out in our neighborhood. I think we all thought the meeting would be pretty short because we were just going to construct a one-page flier. However, we ended up sitting at Rocket Cafe for a couple of hours and getting to know each other more between composing the flier. After much discussion about specific wording and formatting, we came up with a flier that I think we were all excited about. It allowed people to quickly discern the purpose of building blocks and the steps they would need to take to participate without overly emphasizing the monetary aspect. We learned a lot more about Tom at our meeting as well. He has been a supervisor several times for building blocks and participated in the program several years ago. Right now he is unemployed so he feels like he can spend a lot of time as the supervisor, but he is very concerned that we will agree to complete projects that cannot be completed during the work weekends and that he will ultimately end up finishing them himself after the work weekends. I think that because of his experience Tom will be a wonderful asset for us as challenges present themselves. However, Tom also is very clear about what he wont do. He really does not want to work on any eaves troughs nor does he want to support any projects in the back yards of houses. I think that his experience has caused him to be slightly less receptive to innovative ways of attacking problems.
During our meeting at Rocket Cafe, we came up with two days to go door-knocking in our neighborhood during the next week since we had to get our flier approved on Thursday at the neighborhood association meeting. Only one of the times would be before second week. However, after class on Monday night, we all agreed that we should add another session before our next class. We tentatively agreed that we would wait until after our third attempt at door-knocking together to go out to Bellaire St. individually. I was relieved that we were planning more than two door-knocking attempts because it seemed like we were waiting a long time to start the process and that we could easily fall behind schedule. I was also a little worried about Tom’s willingness to accompany us door-knocking. I wasn’t sure how much he planned on participating in our door-knocking and I didn’t think I would be comfortable with him talking to residents when we first met them because I understood that as my responsibility as a student. Sarah, Sam, and I decided that we would talk to Tom about guidelines when we me to start door-knocking.
On Thursday, we had a joint meeting with the neighborhood association and the other groups working in the Hoover neighborhood. The meeting was really helpful in clarifying some of the confusing aspects of the policies of Hoover’s neighborhood association. We learned an interesting lesson on classifying people, too: two Hoover residents at the neighborhood got in a pretty heated discussion about the ‘kinds of people’ that live in Hoover. In suggesting that we also identify ourselves as Kalamazoo College students, one resident generalized all Hoover residents as ‘poor and proud’ and thus not likely to accept handouts from wealthy donors in the city. She used herself as an example, saying that she initially participated in building blocks because she thought it would help her student organizers earn class credit. However, another person at the meeting corrected her, saying that many residents of Hoover are well-educated and not very poor and choose to live there because the like the homes and the proximity to downtown. It was interesting to listen to their conversation because they didn’t seem to want to acknowledge that both people could coexist in Hoover.
That afternoon, it was a really nice day outside and I was feeling guilty about not having seen Bellaire St. yet so I rode my bike to Hoover and made a couple of loops up and down the two blocks that encompass our site. Although it was a warm sunny day, it was also a weekday and one of the things that struck me the most was the number of people who were outside. The only residents I saw were African American and there were a lot of kids playing in the street. Tom told us on Monday that most of the houses were one-story bungalows so I wasn’t expecting as many two-story homes. A stream flows perpendicular to one end of the court, there was one empty lot near the stream and many of the homes close to the stream were for sale. The top story of one of the homes on that block had burned in a fire and no one appeared to live there. The site was a lot more beautiful than I had expected it to be; the homes possessed a friendly character, I think because they were all close to the street, and the atmosphere on the street seemed more friendly than the atmosphere on Reed, the street I rode in on. I left the neighborhood really excited about door-knocking on Saturday.
Saturday afternoon we met Tom in the Hardings parking lot a block away from our site. We were all really embarrassed about arriving late, but Tom was very understanding; apparently he was late, too but had the good fortune to arrive a few minutes before us. To our surprise, before we could talk about the guidelines we wanted to set for door-knocking, Tom made it clear that he was just there to walk down the street and that he would not be talking to the residents. As we were walking to one end or Bellaire St. to start knocking on doors, we were stopped by Greg and Grant in between their two houses. They asked us what we were up to so we decided to talk to them first. I was caught off guard a little so I sort of fumbled my way through an explanation of building blocks but they were both kind enough to listen to me. Between jokes about the huge additions they wanted to add to their already massive houses, they told us they were very interested in the program. Their homes seemed to be the center of much of the activity in the neighborhood and their were several kids playing basketball in front of their homes. It turned out that Greg doesn’t actually live on Bellaire St. but that his two kids, Lashonda and a young boy, do. Grant lives with his mom in the house next door and they seemed to be pretty good friends. They also seemed to be pretty knowledgeable about their neighbors on Bellaire St. and were telling us about the people who lived around them. One of the first things I noticed was their view toward Hispanics. As we were knocking on another door, someone yelled to Sarah and me, “Some Mexicans live there, I don’t think they’re home”. I guess it wasn’t the comment itself but rather the way they emphasized Mexicans that made me take a second look at the block. Everyone who was outside was African American, even though Hoover has a reputation of having a large Hispanic population. As we continued knocking on doors, we met several Hispanic households, some with children, but they all stayed safely inside their houses. Javier and Jose came outside to talk with us but refused to leave their porch as we talked about possible landscaping projects. I noticed the same trend with the few Caucasian families we met. Julie, an elderly Caucasian woman, invited us inside her home to talk before she even knew who we were. Between the squeaks of her rabbit, the squawking of her bird and the soft spinning of her hamster’s wheel; she lamented that her grandchildren used to play outside all the time but that a long time ago the kids moved away and new people moved in and now she doesn’t really go outside anymore. She has two grandchildren who live with her as well and who are close in age to many of the kids we saw playing in the street but when her great-grandson did venture outside on his bike, he didn’t seem to want to interact with any of the kids who were already playing. From our conversation with Margaret, it seems like there may have been a large change in the racial composition of the neighborhood in the last 30 years or so from predominantly Caucasian to predominantly Hispanic and African American.
Sunday afternoon, Sarah, Sam and I headed back to Bellaire St., this time without Tom. There were people we needed to meet for the first time and others we needed to give more information to. As we began to walk down the street, Andrew ran up to us to say hello. We only managed to knock on one door before we were again drawn to Grant and Greg’s homes. This time, we met May Greg, Greg’s mom and the owner of the home where Greg’s kids live. She was very excited about the prospect of getting help to improve her yard as well as getting to know the few neighbors she has not already met. Every car that drove past Bellaire St. while we chatted with May somehow contained passengers who were related to her. She has met almost everyone on the block, although she doesn’t know many of their names. May seems like a very valuable resource because she is so well connected in the neighborhood. She was able to tell us the daily schedules of most of our neighbors and offered to give them fliers and talk about the program when she saw them. Despite the length of time we spent with May, we were unable to divulge any broader issues that she was worried about with her neighborhood because of how distracted she was with visitors. We are going to talk with her more on Tuesday and hopefully we will be able to have a more personal conversation with her. We knocked on the door of the next house on our list an again no one answered. We were about to give up when Sarah noticed some people working in the backyard. After we explained who we were to a teenage boy we met an amazing woman, Janet. It turned out that Janet actually lives on Bank St. and is planning on participating in building blocks in that site. Through our conversation, we discovered that she has epilepsy and MS, and possibly some other serious illnesses. Her husband is currently unemployed because he injured his hands and although they get workers compensation, they have $175 each month to live on after they pay for the rent on their house. They also have 8 children. Because her top priority is caring for her children, Janet has not been able to afford her medication for the past three days and is in a lot of pain. Despite this, she is spending the afternoon with her kids working in her neighbor’s yard. She mentioned her illnesses and the fact that she has no refrigerator, microwave or oven and only two functional burners on her stove casually; as side notes. What she was really worried about was finishing her work on her neighbor’s yard before she was in too much pain to continue. Inspired by Aditi’s visit yesterday, she had started cleaning her yard; an effort that quickly expanded into other yards as well. I was really amazed at how intent Janet was on maintaining her social capital with her neighbors in the face of the extreme financial challenges she is facing.
Sunday, March 27, 2005
best news ever!
School tends to be really lonely when no one else is around. Only one of my friends has returned to school yet and she is an RA and so it chained to the staff room from 9am to 9pm. The shortage of human life is unfortunately forcing me to work on the grant application I should turn in tomorrow. Grr. My flight back was pretty uneventful, with the exception that there were exactly three people on the second leg so we got to fly in a private plane. It was pretty awesome.
After a good morning sleeping in, a 4 mile run, a long trip grocery shopping on my best friend's bike (it is way better than mine so sometimes she lets me borrow it. Plus it has a rack on the back so I can carry more stuff), a couple hours making bread for dinner, and a futile attempt to buy textbooks I was finally brave enough to check my mailbox. I knew that my grades for the quarter would be there, and that meant knowing what I got in organic chemistry. I was hoping for an A- but that was a pretty high hope. I was pretty sure I would get a B+, but a B was still a strong possibility. There is a long and painful history in my family surrounding organic chemistry. My mom was planning on becoming a veterinarian until she did not get an A in organic chemistry and her adviser told her she would not be admitted to veterinary school with anything less than a 4.0 in the sciences. She majored in psychology to be able to graduate on time and now is a professor in the communication department of a college. I survived the first semester of organic quite painlessly with an A but the second semester was the most frustrating class I have ever taken. The main problem stemmed from the fact that I really liked the class and all the material we were covering (which left me no excuse to complain about it). It was just super difficult. Regardless of how well I thought I knew the material I would not perform well on exams. I guess it was a good experience because I have never had to deal with that before where I literally can't do any better. Anyway, top that off with taking an extra class as well as weekly piano lessons and working 40 hours each week (not including commuting time) and I had a pretty stressful quarter. All kinds of justifications were streaming through my head as I opened the letter from the school. I just kind of stared at it for a while in disbelief. There was no B anywhere to be found. Across from "Organic Chemistry II" read A. Not even an A-! I still don't really believe it.
After a good morning sleeping in, a 4 mile run, a long trip grocery shopping on my best friend's bike (it is way better than mine so sometimes she lets me borrow it. Plus it has a rack on the back so I can carry more stuff), a couple hours making bread for dinner, and a futile attempt to buy textbooks I was finally brave enough to check my mailbox. I knew that my grades for the quarter would be there, and that meant knowing what I got in organic chemistry. I was hoping for an A- but that was a pretty high hope. I was pretty sure I would get a B+, but a B was still a strong possibility. There is a long and painful history in my family surrounding organic chemistry. My mom was planning on becoming a veterinarian until she did not get an A in organic chemistry and her adviser told her she would not be admitted to veterinary school with anything less than a 4.0 in the sciences. She majored in psychology to be able to graduate on time and now is a professor in the communication department of a college. I survived the first semester of organic quite painlessly with an A but the second semester was the most frustrating class I have ever taken. The main problem stemmed from the fact that I really liked the class and all the material we were covering (which left me no excuse to complain about it). It was just super difficult. Regardless of how well I thought I knew the material I would not perform well on exams. I guess it was a good experience because I have never had to deal with that before where I literally can't do any better. Anyway, top that off with taking an extra class as well as weekly piano lessons and working 40 hours each week (not including commuting time) and I had a pretty stressful quarter. All kinds of justifications were streaming through my head as I opened the letter from the school. I just kind of stared at it for a while in disbelief. There was no B anywhere to be found. Across from "Organic Chemistry II" read A. Not even an A-! I still don't really believe it.
Thursday, March 24, 2005
I love HMSC!
I drove out to the coast today to see my mentor Pete from my internship last summer. Tim, the veterinarian who I will be working with this summer was on vacation, as was my good friend Dennis, but somewhere between the pine tree shadows through the coastal range and the sun reflecting off the ocean's waves I realized how much I miss being out there. They are currently rennovating the hospital and quarantine rooms and putting in space for me to research (!) I am pretty excited, and they are painting the bottom half of the walls blue, my favorite color, which should make up for the fact that I will be spending my summer once again under fluorescent lighting. I spent a couple of hours talking with Pete. He is the funniest person I think I will ever meet, and constantly makes fun of me. I am very sad, though, because he is probably moving to Jamaica to work with an emerging dolphin program in a month and I will never see him again. Well, I should get back to writing my grant so hopefully I can get paid to work there again in a few months
a quest for wildflowers
So, mom mentioned to me briefly on the phone during final exams week that there was an unprecedented wildflower bloom in Death Valley this year and it would be peaking during Spring Break and that it might be fun to take a road trip down there. I think she was joking. I took it pretty seriously. She also thought that Death Valley was in Northern Califonia. It is actually between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, approximately 1100 miles south of McMinnville. When she picked me up from an incredibly long train ride across the country she foolishly asked me what to do. "Go to see the wildflowers", I replied. Never mind that I had just sat on a train for 55 hours, road trips are always fun. The next morning, at 6:00am (a compromise between my idea of early -- 4:00 and hers -- 6:00) we were off. Here are the results:
We've explored Northern Oregon, but after passing Eugene we were both in foreign territory. it was either too dark or too rainy to see much but by the time we entered California, we realized why we don't want them overtaking Oregon. First, they have some serious problems naming town. The first town we encountered was affectionately called Weed (and boasted a clever sign, "Weed like to welcome you" that warrented a picture but the rain had other ideas). Besides Weed, the upper half of California is rather uncreative at naming roads. For several hours we passed exits like the one below:
Soon, however, we reached towns with far more interesting names. Mainly Los Baños, Liberal Avenue in Corning, and Boron (my favorite):
We ended up spending the night a few hours outside of the national park because we had already driven 17 hours and were both pretty tired. The next morning, right before we entered the park we decided to fill up with gas. It was the most expensive gas ever purchased in the US:
The first pass we went over, Jubilee Pass, we saw a couple of flowers and I was amazed so we stopped and started taking pictures. Cars kept driving past us -- it wasn't unitl about an hour later that we realized why. There were far more flowers a few minutes down the road:
Here are some of the flowers we saw: (for a more complete look, check out mom's blog for an upcoming photo album)
A lonely desert gold sunflower, an unnowkn flower, and a desert chicory
Gravel ghost and mom's amazing photo of pebble pincushion
My personal favorite plant that we saw was a parasitic plant called toothed dodder. It inserts suckers into the tissue of its host plant and lives entirely off of it. Here is has engulfed a young Creosote bush:
Alas, there is more to Death Valley than flowers. We took some hikes and a wade in a very salty lake:
Mom keeping a lookout for enemy approaches from nearby Edwards air force base
Salt encrusted rocks at the unusual lake on the valley floor
Death valley from the golden canyon
Me, wading in some very salty water
After listening to a talk by a botonist/ranger where we painlessly learned how to actually identify all the flowers we had been photographing (thanks to his excellent sense of humor), we decided to head back home. Mom was a little tense at times:
but we made it back okay. Road trips rock!
We've explored Northern Oregon, but after passing Eugene we were both in foreign territory. it was either too dark or too rainy to see much but by the time we entered California, we realized why we don't want them overtaking Oregon. First, they have some serious problems naming town. The first town we encountered was affectionately called Weed (and boasted a clever sign, "Weed like to welcome you" that warrented a picture but the rain had other ideas). Besides Weed, the upper half of California is rather uncreative at naming roads. For several hours we passed exits like the one below:
Soon, however, we reached towns with far more interesting names. Mainly Los Baños, Liberal Avenue in Corning, and Boron (my favorite):
We ended up spending the night a few hours outside of the national park because we had already driven 17 hours and were both pretty tired. The next morning, right before we entered the park we decided to fill up with gas. It was the most expensive gas ever purchased in the US:
The first pass we went over, Jubilee Pass, we saw a couple of flowers and I was amazed so we stopped and started taking pictures. Cars kept driving past us -- it wasn't unitl about an hour later that we realized why. There were far more flowers a few minutes down the road:
Here are some of the flowers we saw: (for a more complete look, check out mom's blog for an upcoming photo album)
A lonely desert gold sunflower, an unnowkn flower, and a desert chicory
Gravel ghost and mom's amazing photo of pebble pincushion
My personal favorite plant that we saw was a parasitic plant called toothed dodder. It inserts suckers into the tissue of its host plant and lives entirely off of it. Here is has engulfed a young Creosote bush:
Alas, there is more to Death Valley than flowers. We took some hikes and a wade in a very salty lake:
Mom keeping a lookout for enemy approaches from nearby Edwards air force base
Salt encrusted rocks at the unusual lake on the valley floor
Death valley from the golden canyon
Me, wading in some very salty water
After listening to a talk by a botonist/ranger where we painlessly learned how to actually identify all the flowers we had been photographing (thanks to his excellent sense of humor), we decided to head back home. Mom was a little tense at times:
but we made it back okay. Road trips rock!
