Her skinny, little arms were wrapped tightly around my leg. “Don’t go! You can’t go!” she cried. I looked down at her face – the tears were pouring down. How did she know that it was my last day volunteering there? I’d never see her again after I walked out of the room. It was the last day that I’d read her Green Eggs and Ham. It was the last day we’d play in the park, the last day we’d tear open a bag of animal crackers and divide them for snack time.
I was participating in a month long program in Washington D.C. called Summer JAM (Judaism, Activism, Mitzvah work) sponsored by PANIM: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values. The month was divided between two study and volunteer programs: one addressing the environment issues, the other addressing poverty issues. My group was assigned to Bright Beginnings, a subsidized nursery and day care center in Sursum Corda*, an almost 45 year old government housing project. We looked after the kids while their parents were out working all day–sometimes until 11 o’clock at night. On my first day, a little girl ran up to me and quickly clasped her hand in mine. Startled, I looked down at her; “What’s your name?” I laughed. “Jamaya!” she exclaimed. I asked her how old she was. “Four,” she told me. Her happiness and exuberance struck me as odd, considering her family’s hardships, although I knew that she couldn’t be oblivious to her circumstances.
A neighborhood called Sursum Corda, Latin for ‘lift up your hearts,’ has a nursery called Bright Beginnings, where an attempt at a normal childhood is lived out with padlocks and 24-hour security. How ironic. The center embodied an attempt at justice in the midst of overwhelming inequality–corporations and companies trying to do right in the eyes of the public by making five-digit grants to a nursery for homeless children. It served as a place for kids to be kids, where they could eat, sleep and play.
I decided that I would try to spend most of my time with Jamaya for the remainder of my visits. I wanted to make an impression on her. My counselors had told me that many of these children’s fathers had left or had never been present in their lives. They were therefore hungry for as much male attention as they could get. The girls expressed their feelings with affection while the boys were angry and withdrawn.
Every day we would all go to a public park a block or so from the center. I saw the park as a real chance for normalcy for the kids. There were no locks and no security guards, just a jungle gym, a playhouse and thirty or so yards of grass for the kids to play on. On our way to the park one day, as we were crossing the street, I looked to my left and saw the Washington National Monument, a symbol of our nation’s wealth and power. I looked all around and saw dilapidated homes and buildings and trash littering the street and broken glass on the sidewalk. I glanced down and saw Jamaya, her hand in mine. In a moment of naiveté I was puzzled and shocked as to how and why our government could let cases of poverty and homelessness such as the ones I was witnessing go unchecked.
I find myself writing and reminiscing about Jamaya, although I doubt that she’ll remember me. I offered her moments of attention and diversion when she needed them most. It would be egotistical for me to even think that I made a lasting impression on Jamaya. I chose to participate in PANIM Summer JAM after my friend, Jonas, told me about his experiences on it the previous summer. I immediately took interest in it. I didn’t want to spend another summer working at a camp for a month for a meager salary, nor did I want to waste my summer in front of a TV screen. I wanted to have fun, but I wanted to do something meaningful that would change my perspective on life. Poverty and homelessness are now what I saw in Sursum Corda on my way to the park, not just words that I’d see in the papers or hear on national news. Poverty and homelessness are Jamaya, her family, and a nursery which needs to have padlocks and security.
* “Sursum Corda Cooperative is a small neighborhood located in Washington, DC. It consists of 199 housing units constructed as an experiment in cooperatively managed low-income housing in 1968. Managed by the District of Columbia Housing Authority, it became a notorious open air drug market plagued by violence and poverty in the 1980s.” (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=define%3A+sursum+corda&btnG=Search)
-Uri Weiss
JAMer'07
