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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