Tuesdays on Broad Street: Week 3

A few weeks ago, I began a Community Service Learning course for college, which requires me 1) to attain 80 volunteer hours at two local NGOs or charities and 2) reflect on, record and share my experiences.

For my minor project, I am serving 20 hours at Augusta Care Pregnancy Center. Over the next few weeks, I'll be blogging about my experience and the not-always-academic things I'm learning. These are my honest, immediate observations and reactions after each day I serve. I hope you read with a compassionate heart and are stirred to action in your own community!

Week 3: Placing Boards

“Kylee I said no!”

Kylee, an eighteen-month old with a pink bow in her hair, raises mocha-brown eyes to my face and glares.

“Annalise had it first,” I insist. “No snatching. You can share the toy.”

Kylee pokes out a lip, but she hands the surprise box back to Annalise, and toddles away to find another toy.

It’s Tuesday night and I’m baby-sitting for a parenting class that’s being held a couple rooms down the hall. I sat through one of the classes a couple weeks ago, and in all embarrassing honesty, I nearly fell asleep.

This Tuesday night, I offer to babysit instead. For awhile, it’s just Kylee and I. We play with a dog-shaped xylophone, a stained baby-doll stroller, and of course, the surprise box. I feed her bits of a broken Pop-Tart, and Kylee leaves sugar trails across the scratchy blue and green carpet. A quiet hour passes.

One of the girls playing during parenting classes

Suddenly a child’s head pops over the top of the half door. It hangs for a moment and then disappears. Startled, I walk over and peer into the hallway. A boy, eight or nine, with glasses and a puffy winter jacket grins up at me.

“Hello,” I say.

“Hello!” He stares at me, offering no explanation on where he came from or who he belongs to.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Christian.”

“Hi Christian, I’m Lauren.”

He cocks his head. “Whaat?”

“...I’m Lauren?”

“Okay.”

“Do you want to come in?”

He shrugs. “Sure!”

Christian walks in, slaps a backpack onto the table and pulls out a chapter book. “I have to read to page 62,” he says. “I read all the way to page 43 yesterday!”

“Way to go! Reading is great.”

“Yeah I like it,” he opens the book, but keeps talking. “Don’t you like the name Christian?”

“Sure! It’s a good name.”

“I think the ‘K’ is so cool.”

“Oh, it’s Kristian with a K?” My bad.

“Yeah. I think it’s a cool name.” He spots Kylee’s Pop-tart. “Oh! Can I have one?”

“You’ll have to ask Ms. Ophelia. She gave it to Kylee.”

He bolts out of the room. A few minutes later, he returns. “My momma said I couldn’t have one,” he says with droopy shoulders. He slumps at the table and picks up his book again. But he can’t resist talking. And so for the next thirty minutes, I listen to stories about Kristian's life.

“Sammy, he’s my little brother, he got in trouble at school today. He gets in trouble a lot. He never shares with me.”

“Some of the kids at my old school bullied me, so my momma moved me to a new school. But now I miss my friends from the old school!”

“I wish my parents lived in the same house. They used to fight a lot, yell and stuff. Now they don’t live in the same house anymore. Do your parents live in the same house?”

“Yes, they do. I’m very lucky and thankful for that,” I respond.

“I pray every night that God would make my parents move back together.”
My heart tugs. “That’s good that you pray!” I don’t know what else to say.

“Yeah, but I didn’t pray before when I was younger, cause I didn’t know how to. So I think that’s why my dad moved away.”

“No, Kristian, that’s not true!”

He shrugs. “I guess. Do you know how to be a Christian?”

“Yes, do you?”

“Yes. I have to confess my sins, pray, and receive the Holy Ghost.”

I can’t help but laugh at his passionately serious face as he says this. “That’s right! Have you done that?”

“Yeah but… I haven’t been baptized.”

“Oh, I see. Why not?”

“Because I’m scared of the water!” He throws his hands up over his head.

“Scared of the water?” I exclaim.

“Yeah! Nobody ever taught me how to swim. So I’m scared of the water! Do you know how to swim?”

“Yes I do. I love to swim. If I had a pool, I’d teach you how to swim!”

“Ah man,” he shakes his head. “I wish you had a pool.”

Cleaning and re-organizing the toy closets

The conversation continues. Kristian turns pages in his book, even looks down at the pages once or twice. But mostly he chats away. He’s a deep thinker for his age, and knows a lot about Jesus. He says he dad taught him. Somehow, in the twisty, non-sequential way of children, we get to the hard issues, like evil and bad things. Eventually, I’m telling him about Satan, and how he brought sin and darkness into the world. I explain how that’s why people choose to do bad things and hurt each other. It’s so easy to type now, but in the moment, I struggled to find a balance between bitter truth and safe lies.

“So Satan makes Sammy do bad things! That’s why he gets in trouble so much!” Kristian exclaims.

“Well, no,” I jump in. “Sammy has a choice. He can either do good or bad things. Maybe he chooses bad sometimes. But we all have a choice. Like Adam and Eve.”

“Like who?”

I stop, shocked that this kid knows so much about the “Holy Ghost”, but doesn’t know about Adam and Eve. “The first man and woman?” I prompt. Kristian stares at me. “Adam and Eve! You’ve never read Genesis?”

“No,” he says frankly.

I pull out my phone. “Oh we are gonna change this right now!” I open the Bible app and tap Genesis 1. “So this is the story about how God created the world.”

“Oo! Can I read it?” he leaps from the table and runs to the rocking chair where I sit. Leaning across the arm of the chair, he begins reading the chapter out loud. He’s an excellent reader and rarely stumbles over a word. His young voice plays the words like fingers on violin strings and my heart fills with so much joy. His face brightens after the end of each day.

“That was the sky?! God made the sky?!”

“Of course he did!”

“Green things. Like those, um, like vegetables!”

Kristian gets to day four and I ask, “Do you know what the greater and lesser lights are?”

“What?”

“The sun and the moon!”

His mouth drops open. “Did God make all the planets!”

“Yes!” My smile is enormous, his joy is so contagious. “And the stars, and everything.” I wish Kristian would read the whole Bible while I listened. The stories I’ve read since I was his age now seem brand new.

At eight o’clock, the class finishes and a woman walks down the hall and leans over the door.

“Elijah, get your stuff!”

I scrunch my brow and gape at Kristian.

“Your name is Elijah, isn’t it?” I say, in overdone surprise.

His eyes go big behind his glasses. “Um. No!” he stammers, “Elijah is my… friend!” He runs around the table, falls to the floor and hides behind a chair.

“Uh-uh! You’re Elijah! You lied to me!” I cross my arms, but make my tone joking, so he knows I’m not really mad at him.

He huffs, his ruse over, and runs around the room, avoiding my eyes. “Yeah, okay, whatever. But isn’t Kristian a good name?”

“Yes, but so is Elijah.”

He rolls his eyes. “Okay. Well, I’ll see you next week and I’ll tell you my real name!”

As I went home, I thought about how I was going to turn this week at the CPC into a meaningful blog. All I did was play with babies and talk with a boy who bold-faced lied about his name for two hours. But I sit here and type this all out now and I’m not mad at Kristian/Elijah. I don’t feel like the baby-sitting was a waste. And I don’t think I’m trying to impose meaning on a mundane task by saying that organizing buckets of toys, telling a boy to pray about his hydrophobia, and reading Genesis in a rocking chair are how bad cycles are broken.

It’s cliche, but bridges are built one board, one nail, one brick at a time. For me, Week 3 was a board under my foot, a board that brought me closer to understanding a different world, Elijah and Kylee's world. Love is a slow process, understanding even slower, but the CPC is showing me that slow processes bring the deepest, most lasting change, if we will have the patience to give them a try.