Stayin’ Alive

Complacency, I think, is a phantom menace. To borrow a term from a creatively disappointing movie of the same name.

Before Co-Worker left, he and I talked about the overall state of the property. The non-profit corporation that owns this housing project bought it out about ten years ago, rehabilitated all of the buildings, kicked out all the “tenants” who didn’t want to adhere to a healthier lifestyle, implemented numerous educational and practical, useful programs for both adults and youth, and was entirely vigilant about what went on around here.

Now… errr… not so much.

Adult ed has been cut, the youth program has been scaled down, and the general emphasis on the “human side” is disappearing. “Money is tight” — you know, the usual. But aside from vanishing programs, that community vigilance has become eroded by complacency. A lot of new people have and are moving in, so it’s like a second generation of renters. Much of that new wave hasn’t really adopted the policies of this place when it was put together.

When that first shooting happened back in February, the people Upstairs said guns rarely go off around here during the day. It seemed to be an isolated incident. No one really had cause for concern, or so they said. Three weeks later, this next round of violence took place. All during the late-afternoon an evening hours, when kids were coming back here from school.

This time, our meeting with Upstairs had a different feel. Someone asked if people believed this to be the tail end of a string of incidents, or if the violence was escalating. It became a unanimous opinion that things were only getting worse. In addition to the gun violence, a cabbie had just been robbed on property. It was revealed that authorities believed there were “ten crack houses in one of the buildings and eight in another.” This is figured from the huge amount of off-site traffic visiting certain apartments.

The incidents are, I’m told, “being investigated.” Color me skeptical when I hear things like that, especially if the “investigations” are just as useless as the ones conducted when we were robbed and vandalized by our own participants. Who, by the way, still haven’t been punished/arrested/sent to live in the Yukon, despite a pile of evidence that we provided. Whatever.

But, the people who are in charge of checking this stuff out aren’t sure if it’s younger adults waving guns around the property, outside drug-dealing related, beefs with other neighborhoods, or … what. I wondered why the cops can’t simply bust down the doors of the apartments suspected of serving as crack houses, and apparently some 30-day notice law exists. I didn’t really understand it. I don’t understand a lot of what goes on here.

Every couple weeks, I have a meeting with my supervisor from AmeriCorps. She’s in charge of the 15 or so of us committed to this Washington, DC sub-group of our sub-group of AmeriCorps. This would be better explained with a flowchart and colorful graphs, but I’m not Captain Kinkos. I’d been emailing her about the goings-on at my site regarding the shootings and whatnot, so she had a basic understanding about recent events. But at our last meeting, when I gave her more of the specific details, she came back with this:

“I was fully prepared for you to request a transfer, and I’d even recommend it.”

Oh.

I didn’t really know how to respond other than “I don’t.” I guess I wasn’t surprised she figured that, because maybe only crazy people would voluntarily stay with all that going on. I’m the only person at our bi-weekly sub-group meetings to share stories about guns, break-ins, and general 11:00 news-ish events. Everyone works at different places, all in different “arenas” (adult literacy, refugee immersion, GED programs, teen mother and infant care, etc), and my after school teen center is unique from the rest. So maybe that’s why. But regardless of my experience being a lot more Dangerous Minds than everyone else’s doesn’t make me want to go somewhere else.

The idea of starting over after six months of building relationships and trust here sounds about as fun as root canal work. I have enough sense to get out if things become out of control, but this is the reality of daily life for these kids. And for eight hours a day, it is for me, too.