On March 28th I went to a talk given by a woman named Nancy Newman. She is the director of a program called the Ark, which is a sort of day care and preschool for homeless children, and those whose parents are recovering from addiction. The talk centered around the effects of poverty on young children, and why these children, and this program, are so unique.
Ms. Newman has been living in Baltimore for quite some time now, and she saw her neighborhood begin to deteriorate into an area of very low socioeconomic status. It had been a very diverse area to begin with, but now it was changing even more. Ms. Newman was a social worker, intending to start a day care for the families who lack the resources to send their kids to any other day care. The Ark has now been certified as a real preschool, and their goal is to get the students at their level of development, and well prepared for a regular elementary school.
She began the discussion by asking herself and her audience, what is poverty? She first defined it as a lack of resources. Then she began to tell us stories of the people she works with at the Ark. For example, a woman had just come in that day with three children and no husband, and her 5 years on welfare were almost up. True poverty. No family, no money, no job, no societal status, and no help whatsoever. This family had nothing. That is an example of all the families she works with at the Ark. Children will tell her about the soup kitchens they slept in the night before. Sometimes, they have kids that come in for less than a week and they never hear of them again. They probably end up roaming the streets of Baltimore. It is a huge tragedy, but places like the Ark are what give hope to many people.
While most of the families are single women and her children, she says some are the grandparents with the kids, whose parents are in jail. There are even some fathers couples as well. Many of the kids are learning disabled, and tragically under-stimulated. They have nothing to do or play with, no where to wash themselves, no food or heat in the winter. Yet Loyola students pay 40,000 dollars tuition right down the road. However, the Year of the City could be paying off a little for these people. There are ways to get involved with the Ark through CCSJ. This seems to me like it has the greatest need. All these kids need is someone to play with, who wouldn’t want to give up a few hours a week to play? It seems like a great cause to me. By leaving their kids at the Ark, parents can go look for jobs, or homes, or loans. Even the time to make friends, which could make a huge difference. As Ms. Newman said, true poverty is when you have no one to turn to. Friends and families make unreal differences to people who have nothing. Year of the City asks us to be friends to these people. To give them the time of day. To give them help – just mentally, not monetary. Little things are what make the biggest differences. Without other people, we couldn’t survive, and why should they be the ones to not have others to turn to. They are the people who need friends more than anyone, and if we can be that to them, or at least their children, why not?
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