“I want you to get out of East Harlem and never come back”

Growing up in East Harlem, an urban neighborhood in New York City, I was surrounded by many different cultures. In my neighborhood during the 90’s, the streets were bright and filled with music, color and dancing during the day, and once the sun went down, everyone came in side. My mother wouldn’t let my brother and I play outside once the sun started going down. The gangs the Bloods and the Crips often ran the streets late and night, and my mother knew that the streets were not safe. Before I left to college, she told me “I want you to get out of East Harlem and never come back,” because she didn’t want me to get trapped in the “hood” for all of my life; she believed that I was better than East Harlem. My mother refused to allow me to be part of the growing statistics of Latino high school dropouts. I was taught that I am to strive to be able to provide a better life than what I experienced, for my children and for myself.

As someone who loves being around children and doesn’t do that enough while in college, I had an absolutely brilliant time on Friday’s trip to Camden. We were introduced to the fifth grade students in the green house and played a name game with them. I was relieved that they weren’t shy or unenthusiastic to see us, because although I love kids, I get anxious about not knowing what to talk about. I’m not in tune with American pop culture or other things that could be easy conversation topics with them, but thankfully both my 5th grade buddies Janelle and Maria had plenty to tell me about planting seeds and their lessons in school about recycling.

First, we planted one tray with two types of tomatoes. The girls talked about their feelings regarding the taste of vegetables. Janelle said the first time she tasted salad, she really didn’t like it, but now she likes it a bit more. I told her that I used to feel the same, and now I love salad; when you grow up, your tastes change. We then planted another tray with yellow peppers. Maria chatted more than Janelle, but both were eager to keep my attention. I asked them questions about the lessons they had in school, if they had been to Philadelphia and what they thought about it. Just this week, Maria said, they’d gone to see an orchestra in Philadelphia, and they really liked it.

"If Camden was overseas, we'd have sent troops and foreign aid." -Dramatic much? Having seen Camden and interacting with some of the people, I feel like this article was blown up for publicity. Matt Taibbi claims to write about Camden, but when you write about someone or some place, shouldn't you speak from all the angles and not just the ones that will make people stop in awe and surprise. I too grew up in a publicized part of the city that is known to be one of the worst places to find yourself in. One fulll of drugs and violence and no hope for progress. Yet, I'm still living there, walking the "hopeless streets" and enjoying some of the most delicious food I've had in some of the "shaddiest" and "ugliest" family owned restaurants. Personally, I believe Matt has no right to talk about Camden the way he does. He mentions how corrupt and hopeless Camden is, and my question is- "What do you wish to achieve through this? Making it better?" No! If anything he gives Camden no hope, he gives its people, it's families and children no respect. He needs to apologize and learn to give places a chance based on self experience, not reputation. 

I was somewhat shocked when I read Apocalypse, New Jersey: A Dispatch From America’s Most Desperate Town written by Matt Taibbi. Throughout the article Taibbi talks about the negatives of Camden. How Camden has been pushed aside from New Jersey and Philadelphia due to the amount of crime, violence, and drugs within the neighborhood. Even though we’ve only been to Camden twice I still feel that Camden is progressing and isn’t want Taibbi portrayed it as. Yes part of the streets, parks, and buildings have some vandalism or destruction to them, but I feel like I don’t see the violence. I was surprised when Taibbi mentioned that when police officers stopped working the crime rate went up and that now there are all of these hi-tec security cameras all over to detect when different crimes are occurring. The other point Taibbi made was that there were 175 open-air drug markets and that Christie “wanted to go after New Jersey urban schools, which he derided as failure factories.” I think that ways in which to help the community would be by adding more businesses to the neighborhood to increase the job market. Once more jobs are available there will be less tension within the community. Taibbi made Camden seem like a terrifying community to go to, but to me it has progressed more and will continue to progress. 

There is sometimes a stigma that urban city kids aren’t into “the environment” or “nature.” Going to an urban city school in Boston myself, I know that this isn’t the case because of the students themselves, but sometimes can be forced onto them because of accessibility. While in the Boston Public School system, I loved learning about the environment in my science classroom for all of the 3 short weeks we spent on it during senior year. But I never had access to a greenhouse. Far too many urban students don’t have access to spaces like this, and I think the stigma stems from that lack of environmental accessibility. It was heartwarming to see the students engaged and excited about the dirt and seeds and nature in the greenhouse, and such a wonderful contradiction to that stigma. My partner knew so much about planting and gardening, and was also genuinely passionate about it, which was great to see that this wasn’t just a boring class project day, but something they wanted to be doing. Hopefully they’ll continue with that interest, and maybe even be like the other older students we met months ago working/volunteering for the organization. And, maybe even some of these students will end up at BMC doing a 360, like the boy said during our go-around in Camden on MLK day—“I want to do this 360 thing too someday.” A lot of hope.

On Friday, my 360 friends and I had the opportunity of learning from and teaching a fifth grade class in Camden. We were met by the fifth grade students at the Center; their energy was infectious. Starting out the session with a dancing name game activity set the stage for a fun day and allowed everyone to loosen up and get comfortable with another. After introductions, I paired up with two of the fifth graders, Evan and Jason, to begin planting seeds. Jason told me that he wanted to grow french fries, and I replied by saying that sounded good, but we had to grow a certain vegetable first. We then decided that if we could, we would grow potatoes and carrots. Lori, an intern at the Center handed us two different kinds of tomatoes, so we planted those instead. We were instructed to divide up the tray into two parts--half of it would be used for the Nepal Tomatoes and the other half would be for the Berry Wine tomatoes--and two seeds would go into each individual section. The boys gave me directions on how to plant the seeds and planted two full trays. They were a little bit nervous about accidently putting more than two seeds into each section, so they poked holes in the parts of the tray that had no seeds, keeping them on track of where they had planted seeds. After finishing up planting seeds in two trays, we all took a lunch break. As we were heading inside, Jason talked about how much he wanted a burger from McDonalds.

The beginning of the week was not the best due to the horrible flu going on around campus. I was determined to be better by the time Friday came. I was so excited to be able to go to Camden on Friday. I kept thinking that the morning was going to be cold and miserable, but once I walked into the greenhouse I felt really happy and warm. Going around in the large circle and saying our names and doing a dance move was a lot of fun and a great way to break the ice between us and the 5th graders. I was paired with two fifth graders and a volunteer student (I won’t be using their names in this post). The four of us were a speed team as we were planting. As we planted I kept asking the fifth graders if they had planted seeds before or the types of vegetables they liked to eat. The two of them kept telling me how much they hated eggplant and I just kept thinking how much I wanted to cook them eggplant the way I make it and have them try it.

Why is Camden "America's most desperate town?" And of they are so desperate just what are they desperate for? In his Rolling Stone article, Matt Taibbi expounds much on the horrors of Camden–the crime, the violence, the drugs, the remaining half of the police force that cannot seem to manage a city that seems more like a war zone if Taibbi's article is to be taken at face value. However, in all the stories–of scars and injuries, of people scraping by and trying to their best make ends meet when jobs are few and far between and grocery stores non-existent, and the people who tried to fight tooth and nail against the cement factory and other sources of environmental pollution that seemed anxious to subjugate the city beneath a slew of toxic chemicals–I hear no desperation. The anecdotes of life in Camden reveal to me something far stronger and more powerful than desperation, I hear and see a fierce tenacity in the fighting spirit of each Camdenite, a powerful love for a town the rest of the world had all but written off years ago. My experiece with Camden must have been a fluke or special circumstance following the affirmations of Taibbi. Yes, I saw the dilapadated structures and pot-holes streets and the building of the water treatment facility on every horizon, but the people I met exuded far more hope than desperation. The folks from the Center for Environmental Transformation had so many positive things to say about the people and the city, and that positivity is reeflected in the work they do to better Camden's environment.

First, to say what I liked about this article, brief because I disliked most of it- I appreciated that the author tried to contextualize Camden within larger national and global processes of politics and nationalism.  There was a lot about the history of Camden in the article that I didn't know, though of course I am as skeptical of the historical information provided as I am about everything else in the article.  But otherwise, I have to agree with Ari's letter to the editor in that the article "Apocalypse, New Jersey" shows the danger of a single story by portraying Camden only as a broken and crime-ridden city.  As someone who doesn't know much about Camden besides what I've read and seen on my two visits as an outsider, I don't know enough about Camden to say exactly what is wrong about the article, to propose another story that can be told.  It's not my place, not my right, to tell a story about a place I don't know- if I tried, the story would only be representative of me.  But as someone who is interested in crime rhetoric and our prison system, I am irritated by and skeptical of the discussion of crime in this article.  The article reads like it's making a half-hearted attempt to contextualize crime, to explain that there's more crime in Camden than in other places because a lack of jobs forces people into the illegal economy, but the article still ends up reading like it's villainizing drug dealers and other people who commit "criminal" acts as horrible people.

To be entirely honest, before we arrived and started working with the 5th grade students, I wasn't looking forward to this trip.  Because I was exhausted from the past few weeks and had little experience with teaching, I was very nervous, both about messing up the lesson and about being too tired to connect as much as possible with the students.  When we were told that we'd be working individually with students in the greenhouse, I grew even more anxious, worried that I wouldn't be a good teacher or learning partner to whomever I was paired with.  But, once we started our introduction activity and I saw the students' enthusiam, and their awesome dance moves, my worries dissipated and I felt better than I had for days.  Their energy and enthusiam was infectious, and I found myself increasingly engaged in everything we were doing.  It turned out that my worries about working one-on-one with a student in the greenhouse were unfounded- I really enjoyed working with and talking to the student I was paired with, and I loved hearing about how she likes gardening and math (it always makes me so happy to hear that students like math, since too many educational systems are far too good at teaching students to hate it).  One of the most powerful moments for me was when I was standing with the student I was paired with and another student and, when they asked if I made rubber band bracelets and I said I wasn't sure what they meant, the other student showed me the one she was wearing and said I could have it.