Wednesday, August 13, 2014

A Week with Paul Habans and Kareem Kennedy

The week that I spent in NOLA this year reinforced my commitment to this annual trip. 

Last year, just over a week before taking this trip, I met a young man called Kareem Kennedy at the Free Minds, Free People conference in Chicago. Kareem was representing a group of young leaders of New Orleans.

We exchanged phone numbers, and he spent our first Sunday in NOLA taking my friend and I around town.  He was 23 years old, a student at Southern University of New Orleans, and had fairly recently published a book, Aunt Alice vs. Bob Marley: My Education in New Orleans. We stopped for a rest near the park and he showed us his book and his scars from the time he was shot.

Listening to him talk about his youth was at once horrifying and inspiring - how had this young man come this far with so many roadblocks? He is intelligent, articulate and generous.  The reason we saw him on Sunday and not on Saturday was because he had been busy Saturday, volunteering at the sidewalk library. Here is a young man who knows the value of education and literature, and of being a role model for youth in the kind of urban American setting where many would and do give up hope. 

Knowing him and his story gave special meaning to the work PIEs does in New Orleans, promoting opportunities for education and learning in post-Katrina NOLA by supporting schools to reopen each year.  Having had the opportunity to meet Brenda, Adrienne’s mom, on the trip last year, I felt inspired to invite my own mom and share the experience with her this year.  My mom always nurtured my love of books as a child and prioritized education for my brother and me. I couldn't imagine a better way for us to enjoy time together and give back.

This year, we spent the week setting up the library, scanning, organizing, grade-leveling and shelving thousands and thousands of books. We joked and reminisced ("Look I found a book about Tyler; it's called P.U!"). In the back of my mind as we worked, I wondered about the capacity of the school and how much value our work added. What kind of opportunities to read books at home had the children had during the past year? I lived in the library as a child. I lived for the book fairs; I would circle all the books I wanted as soon as the advertisement came out.

Last summer when we came, there were other groups of volunteers in addition to PIEs; youth on church missions and the like. There was a lot of work to do freshening up the school and, at first, we worked alongside these other groups painting, cleaning and organizing. After painting the cafeteria and kitchen, we started work in the library in the second half of the week, grade leveling mountains of books.  We had about 5 desktop computers to work from and we worked from two classrooms stacked with tables, chairs and thousands of books.

This year, things were different.  When we arrived, we were the only group there, and the school entrusted us with nearly 10 laptops and 18 iPhones to do our work.

The school looked incredible compared to the first day we walked in last year, when the halls were piled with desks and chairs, the walls were bare and the floors dull and dusty. It was hard to believe children would be gracing those halls later that same week!

This year, we walked in to gleaming floors and hallways bright with inspiring quotations hanging from the ceiling.  Some classrooms were labelled with the names of universities (Berkley; Princeton) and little gold and maroon crowns proclaimed the room numbers next to classroom doors.  There were families in and out of the school, buying uniforms and registering their children.   

Best of all, there was a designated library, full of shelves overflowing with books of all kinds and levels. Classrooms also had their own collections of books, which we also carefully scanned and re-shelved for the teachers. 

Our volunteer team had people of diverse abilities and there were jobs for everyone, from putting tennis balls on the bottom of chairs and desks, to organizing reference libraries, to "eyeballing" books to decide with what grade level they should be labeled. I had the opportunity to work with old and new members of the PIEs family, including two young women studying human services at National Louis. It’s exciting to see the caliber of young people we have around us.

I also got to see Kareem three times this visit, introduce him to the team and buy copies of his book. It was a time for celebration - he graduated from SUNO this year and got his first job out of college as a client advocate for the Orleans Public Defenders. He joined the PIEs group one night for dinner and the Jazz Orchestra at Snug Harbor.  

Kareem is one of many reasons I will keep coming back to NOLA with PIEs.  He is a living example of the promise in youth. I know it is always worth it to support education and opportunities for youth to be engaged. Not only will they succeed, they help the rest of us succeed.

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