Monday

This morning I got up and ready, preparing to go back into the city for another day of community service. Subways are now pretty comfortable for me, except for the smell. I still do take a while to figure out which way I need to go, and which direction is north and south.

At the place where we wait for the bus, there is a guy who sells pirated CDs and DVDs. He’s there every day working out of a CD case and a laptop. I’ve now got his pitch memorized, “CDs…DVDs…watch em’ before you buy em’, CD’s…listen before you buy em”. In other bus news, I’m finding that busses are largely unreliable in general, and many of the people who lived in Philly that we have gotten a chance to talk to don’t take them typically.

At work, I spend the majority of the time in the computer lab trying to unify their network. I don’t know if I have the technical ability at this point to do it. Usually with a day or two of brute force and applying the things I do know, I can figure out how something computer-related works, and fix it. Creating and administrating a network using DNS under Windows server 2003 and Windows 2000 might just be above me. Its not all that bad, since I’ve got a better handle on things in general for when I have to go start installing the software they needed on the computers, which I’ll probably ask to start on Tuesday.

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Monday’s class was a disaster. We had the Philly Messiah administrator come in, and we got into dialog with our teacher about problems that we were having. I know some girls specifically who feel very uncomfortable about going into Kensington and the badlands in small, all-girl groups (2-4 people). That being said, there are some bigger guys who don’t feel safe going into Kensington for their service. Others complained about the lack of orientation we got to the city, especially for people who have lived in rural areas their whole life.

What we got told, is that Messiah can’t be at every street corner and tell us about every danger, so they aren’t going to even try. The admin and teachers all life in the area, so they know what’s safe and what isn’t, though their twenty-some years of experience. Many of us are clueless to bad areas, and don’t want to “learn through experience” (being mugged, attacked, ect). We were also told that we will simply have to be on our guard at all times, on the street, in our building, and in our rooms. In general, people had their concerns ignored, and were told that constant fear is something you have to suck up.

This all went on for an hour and a half. The guest speaker then got up (who thought she was going to have the full three hour class). She was a white women from a white background, who now lived in the city, and was going to speak to us on the topic of racial justice. While our primary teacher (who has yet to teach a class period) is only subtly anti-white, this woman made a girl cry out of embarrassment for how terrible our race is. Her message was that white people have been / are so terrible, that we must live solely for the purpose of racial reconciliation. From her handout…

“Give serious thought to where you will live long term. It is probably the most spiritual decision you ever make. If you move into an area of people just like you, you will likely be committing spiritual suicide. If you move into an area of diversity where these issues will be in front of you every day (and will be affecting your own family, neighborhood, and friends), you will likely stay engaged in the process.”

She went on to call out how spiritually dead people are that live in the suburbs, have their kids home schooled, and live around people like them.

At one point, one of my classmates asked how he should react to people of other cultures when they are racist against whites when we try to respectfully approach them, either to talk or to give aid. One thing we all thought about was the author who read on Saturday, who was constantly going “gringo gringo gringo” and saying that all whites are terrible, rich people who oppress others.

The teacher first asked how old he was (22). She then tearfully told him that he was an embarrassment to her, and that in seventy years he would never know the magnitude of injustice done to Latino Americans and blacks. She told him that he was being defensive, and lots of other things that came from a highly warped sense of what he asked. Every student in the class stood up to defend him, but it was students vs. our teacher and guest speaker. They didn’t listen, or change their message, same as with the girl who was crying our of embarrassment for being white.

The whole class was terrible – ignored concerns, then white-bashing. As a group, we’re about one more bad experience from not going to class. I really won’t abide having my race attacked by my superiors, and our concerns being brushed off.

On the bright side, a bunch of us went and played soccer on the turf field after class, to get some anger out. It was a really good time.