SUMMERS WITH JAMAAL
Field trips made the difference for one ward of the court
by Rodolpho Carrasco
July, 2002 in Re:generation
Quarterly
Rodolpho Carrasco is associate director of Harambee Christian Family Center in Pasadena, Calif.
For three years Jamaal Johnson lived in my home, and I still call him my nephew. This summer I'm a proud uncle: in June, Jamaal was accepted to Nyack College, a four-year school in New York. He starts classes in September. In ninth grade, Jamaal was a straight-F student. His story has the sad marks of many young people's: born into a family with few prospects, parents effectively absent, passed along by public schools. Yet in August he will step onto campus and start an exciting new chapter in his life.
All sorts of factors contributed to Jamaal's success. He found shelter, figuratively and literally, in Harambee Center's Junior Staff program. He became a Christian and attended a local church faithfully. Church members and elders, Harambee staff and volunteers, and donors held many doors open for him.
But we never knew for sure whether Jamaal would step through those open doors. Jamaal is a ward of the court, a foster child who never lived in a group home, but whose experience mirrors those of other foster children. Two years ago he became what the system calls an emancipated foster youth, no longer required to live under adult supervision. Though he had achieved some success, he didn’t feel ready to be out on his own. "For many, leaving Foster Care is like going over a cliff," the League of Women Voters reported in a recent study. "The general population does not give it a thought, but emancipated foster children need everything a parent would give a child of the same age." Another study estimates that one-third of the homeless people on the streets of New York and Los Angeles were once in foster care.
In the absence of parents able and willing to give him guidance, Jamaal made the unusual decision to join our church. I say unusual because not many people -- young or old -- choose the hard give-and-take of being a member of a church community like ours, which actually expects that we’ll look out for one another and that younger members will submit to the wisdom of their elders. We loved Jamaal, and he trusted our guidance, and he has leaned on the nurture and material support of this body of people for the past five years. The entire congregation shares his joy at moving on to college.
But the other reason Jamaal is on the move, I'm convinced, is several summers' worth of travel.
Field trips are the secret weapon of youth development. In his five years as a member of the Harambee community, Jamaal traveled via Greyhound buses, ministry vans, and planes to Michigan, New York, Mississippi, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, New Mexico, Philadelphia, and Seattle.
When he was 16, Jamaal and I traveled with a group of twenty young men to the East Coast. We took photos of each other at the Statue of Liberty with the World Trade Center in the background. Our ultimate destination was the Promise Keepers gathering of 500,000 men in Washington, D.C. On that day I cried during worship, grateful to God for giving me a life though I had lost my mother and father. As Jamaal watched me singing and crying, he turned to another group leader and said, "It's marinating on him"–perhaps the best description I’ve ever heard of what the Spirit does to us during worship.
Two summers ago Jamaal took a 72-hour bus trip from Pasadena to a Christian commune in upstate New York, where he spent a month living an alternate reality among a Bruderhof community. One morning, as he picked green beans at 6 a.m. in a cold field, he hit bottom. "What in the world am I doing here?" he asked himself.
But the most significant trip took place last summer. Jamaal journeyed with me to Cartagena, Colombia, for a four-day church-planting conference attended by youth from fifteen Latin nations.
At that time we had a running argument. Jamaal had been saying he was poor. I kept insisting that he was rich. He pointed to the relative lack of money in his pocket, the fact that his parents were out of the picture, and his identity as a profiled young black male. I emphasized his opportunities and his access to people, capital, and a future. I spent the summer prior to our trip describing poverty in other parts of the world, trying to prove he had it better than most any person in history. He wasn’t buying it.
But one day in Cartegena we drove through a dirty barrio far away from our hotel. Jamaal saw people who were poor and motivated to work, but who had no work prospects. Many Colombians are black, like Jamaal. We saw many people who could have been Jamaal standing at street corners, idle. "Any person here would give an arm to trade places with you," I told him. He just shrugged.
But after we got back Jamaal began to seize opportunities. A math tutor showed up -- and every time the tutor visited, Jamaal showed up, too. An elite SAT prep program made a space for Jamaal, and he got himself there, on time, every session, though the course took place ten miles away and he does not own a car. Scholarship applications appeared -- Jamaal filled them out. He completed three college applications on his own, without anyone hounding him.
He even began filling up the Harambee van with gas and then waiting to be reimbursed. When his friends were hungry, he spent his own money to feed them. When his peers were irresponsible, he rebuked them. In the fall he began leading a daily Bible study for high schoolers at 6:30 a.m. After Bible study he would feed the guys and then drive them to school.
He did all this after returning from Cartagena. But that trip also reminded us that he could have turned another direction entirely.
On our way home the police in both Barranquilla and Miami profiled him as a drug runner -- a young black American male with just one small carry-on. They thoroughly interrogated him. It was demeaning and depressing, the sort of thing that feeds the anger of so many young blacks. But Jamaal chose to remember what he saw in Cartagena, not what he experienced on the way home.
Now
Jamaal is moving forward, working hard, learning from his elders, and
handling his business. He will do well in college and life.
He did it. You did it, Jamaal.
And some summer a few years from now, when my adopted nephew finds himself mentoring a teenager immune to good advice, I hope that he’ll remember our drive through that Colombian barrio.
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OTHER ARTICLES BY RODOLPHO CARRASCO
