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Children First

By Soni Pitts

Picture the following scene: I’m sitting in a roomful of kids ranging from kindergarten to 8th grade, all chattering at once in shrill, strident voices. Just prior to this, I was helping a couple of them navigate the murky waters of improper and mixed fractions. At the moment, they’re all working through a snack of fruit and yogurt, which I prepared and served between bouts of mathematics. In a few moments we’ll be going outside in weather that is way too cold for sane people to be out in, so they can shoot some hoops and run off some of their stored energy. And all of this is happening within the confines of a public housing development.

If you’d shown me this scene a year ago and told me that I'd choose it of my own free will, I’d have sworn you were crazy. Today, however, this vision has become my passion.

I am currently doing a year of service with Americorps in Asheville, NC, helping a local United Way program called ChildrenFirst, which provides a variety of services for underprivileged children in the region. During the mornings, I have a relatively quiet, sane and sedate assignment as the volunteer coordinator at a local elementary school - organizing tutors and volunteers, keeping records and creating endless spreadsheets. It’s nice. It’s quiet. And it's mostly just us grown-ups.

During the afternoons, however, I become Miss Soni: Homework Club Lady, complete with an invisible supersuit guaranteed to stand up to months of hugs, tears, sneers and random food-based projectiles without wrinkling, pilling or staining, all while strengthening my spine, enhancing my emotional resilience and providing a reserve battery backup for my deeply tested patience. In this guise, I help run an after-school homework club in a low-income public housing development where the kids who live there can come to get homework help and a healthy snack, participate in enrichment activities and enjoy supervised play in a positive and safe environment, all at no cost to their families.

And although it would have sent me into paroxysms of incredulous laughter if you’d said it a year of go, these kids have stolen my heart. Their ups are my ups, their downs are my downs. Their successes send me into spontaneous end-zone dances and their losses create dark cartoon storm clouds over my head. My heart leaps into my throat every time one of them gives me a hug or shows me a paper with a better grade than the week before, and it misses a beat when they falter or give up on something I know they could master, if they just gave it one more go.

And I do all this for a monthly stipend small enough to make your CPA blanch.

Why? Because I agree with Peter Drucker's famous observation that the best way to predict the future is to create it. And I also live by the wise words of Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage, who sagely said, "I reject your reality and substitute my own."

I want both our current reality and our future to be wide open - free and full of love and opportunities and acceptance and hope for everyone. But to do that, the kids who will make up that reality have to look like that when they get there. And it’s up to all of us here now to help them reach that future with the tools, the resources and the support they will need to do so.

Will I succeed? Maybe. Maybe not. But I’m going to be there, in the future, either way. So I might as well try. The alternative is simply unthinkable.

Soni Pitts

"I reject your reality and substitute my own" - Adam Savage, Mythbusters

Join me on my latest adventure as I spend a year in Americorps working with
at-risk youth! Getting Things Done
(http://gettingthingsdone.wordpress.com/)
 

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