Yesterday I started up my spring session of an after-school, neighborhood children’s get-together at my home. This go-around it will be on Wednesday afternoons for an hour or two after the elementary school lets out. And, happily, I had some help—four other women showed up to assist, three of them early enough to help me walk a small gaggle of kids home from the school through the busy (and very littered) streets.
It’s only four or five blocks from the school but the kids don’t pay much attention to speeding traffic. And the drivers don’t pay much attention to short kids. (Or anyone, for that matter. One sunny day recently, a woman actually took a moment to open her SUV door to yell at me and cuss me out for having crossed the street in front of her, the two boys lagging a bit behind me, apparently slowing her down. I just put my arms out in a shrug and said, “What? What?” Like, “You wanna fight or something? Yeah, bring it on, lady!” Can you imagine me getting into a scrap with some stranger with four little kids looking on, over crossing the street when she felt like tearing off around the corner? I think some people have an issue with patience. Especially in Massachusetts. Especially when it comes to driving.)
We got home, busted out some sidewalk chalk, jumprope, animal crackers and popcorn, and the kids sort of frolicked for a while. We had the Mexican girl from across the street as well as the half-Brazilian girl from across the neighborhood. Both of them are in my son’s kindergarten class. We scoped the street for more kids but most of them didn’t emerge until an hour or so after school, still enough time to join us in a game of foursquare in the driveway. (The kindergartners really had trouble with that game, so we ended up setting up a practice court just for them.) So we had an older new kid from next door, as well as the three Dominican boys from next door on the other side. A Vietnamese family of five or six moved in next to them, just a few months ago, but I haven’t figured out if they’re around regularly after school or not.
The kids also enjoyed the swingset as well as the wagon of musical instruments I keep in the garage. One of our adult helpers tried to sort of muster up an orchestral thing with all the instruments, which didn’t sound all that great, but admittedly it was much better than the chaos of the kids all just wailing on whatever instrument they held. With some effort to conduct them as a group they sounded more like they were sort of taking turns or slowing down. Either way it was preferable to give them a lot of space…
One of the moms came by to pick up her daughter and she and I talked for a few minutes about what it was I was trying to do with this after-school group. I explained that I’m trying to get some more kids from the school and from my street to join in. She asked about who all the kids are. I talked about how diverse the school’s population is, and the neighborhood in general, and how we don’t have all that many opportunities to socialize and build community bonds. So that’s what this is for. She echoed my thoughts and added that doing it through the kids is really effective. I said, “Yeah, and everyone cares about their kids.” Then she offered to come by sometime and help out! That was surprising, since for the most part I have not even interacted much with the parents of these children. I had resigned myself to never seeing the parents.
So it’s a good start to the next several weeks of doing this class… and fortunately we had really good weather, too, which is critical because I need to be able to keep this group outside. (For everyone’s safety, as well as my sanity.)
My Baha’i community is just getting started with a storefront rental effort. The plan is to find a place right in my neighborhood by June 1. If we succeed with that, we can transition this group of children to that location for some summertime group activities, maybe on Saturdays or something, and get more adults involved in a more coordinated fashion.