Going away

Well, it finally happened. After days, nay weeks, of threatening our sponsor with early withdrawal of the team if they did not provide any work for us to do, we finally got the go ahead to pack up and head home. It only took 3 ultimatums. So now we're going back a week early and doing work around the base. It will be good to have something to occupy our time. Just look at what we were reduced to here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXDOy8FZ-Ow

A thing or two

Just a few quick updates:

1: As planned, the half of our team that was working at Dorsey high school traded place with the half that was working for New City Parish. Its nice to get a break from the school but man is it dull here. New City Parish is a broken organization. They have no money, no motivation, and no clue how to get things done. Theres only so much an NCCC team can do to help, and these guys need more than we can offer. What a waste of time and skills.

2: I volunteered to help run a weekly afterschool course for 8th graders teaching them how to best utilize their time in high school to prepare for college. What they didn't tell me until the night before was that I was actually designing and running the course solo. Thanks for the heads up! So I pulled that one out of my ass and got to the middle school with Sandhya ready to go. Only 3 kids showed up, none of them had been to the initial class the week before, and all of them were 6th graders. Were you planning for high school (much less college) in 6th grade? I know I wasn't. These kids had absolutely zero interest in what we had to teach and I don't blame them.

CYFC, the organization that had me doing this project, is a good group, but they have their heads so far up their own asses that they can't see what programs are working and which ones aren't.

3: Only 2 and a half more weeks til we leave this miserable city and crappy project. I can't wait for spring break. Camping at Yosemite? yes please!

a linguistic sidenote

When I say the word "cockroach," I add an extra 'a' syllable in there. "Cock-a-roach." I don't know where I picked this habit up; its just the way I've always said it. It wasn't until I heard people out here saying it that I realized the extra a is not in the word, and most people say it properly with 2 syllables. Now the linguist in me can detect a very faint sound between the k and the r that just naturally occurs because of the way our tongues work so I can see how that could get exaggerated into a full extra syllable in some dialects.

The reason I bring this up is because the other night, I wake up to find a cockaroach on me. Yes, it was fucking ON me! Crawling around on my shoulder like he owned the place. In my panic I flicked him off in the direction of Logan's cot. Logan was awake enough to realize what happened, and now a minor freak out turned into a major freak out as our scampering around trying to stomp the thing woke everyone else up, who in turn were grossed out by the fact there were cockaroaches in our basement. It was quite a sight to see. Or hear, since the lights were out.

My you-tube training prompted me to grab my camera to record the incident. I'd post it, but you really can't see anything (no night vision or lights on this thing, after all) and the audio is NOT family friendly, so I think I'll just leave that one on the hard drive for a while. G'night.

Life in L.A.

Los Angeles is...a place. I'll come right out and say that I think it sucks way more than America's REAL greatest city, New York, and I'll get into the reasons for that at some other time. But we're making the best of our living situation here. Just see what we did with our cave:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By6lNY2c-ig

The weather is nice. We go to the beach to run, and sit there some nights around fire pits.

But look, thats pretty much all this place has to offer in my eyes. The urban sprawl is out of control. You get all the congestion and traffic of a city with none of the convenience of having things close by. And the traffic is even worse because their public transportation outside of the ritzy central areas is a joke, so without a car (or van) you're pretty much out of luck. New Yorkers at elast TRY to not be racist, but segregation is still very much in play in this miserable place. The rich people living in the hills who think L.A. is the greatest are the most willfully and stubbornly blind people I've ever seen: they go about their glamorous lives completely unaware of the injustice happening just a few miles from them, and they don't WANT to know. Its disgusting. I'm not saying it doesn't happen in New York or any city in the world for that matter, but here it seems particularly ingrained in the culture.

It's also been an eye-opening experience. We were raised to believe that, while slavery and racism were bad, civil rights made everything better and as long as we don't judge people based on the color of their skin, everything will be alright. But in the ghettos of L.A., everything is not alright. The problem has not gone away just because we've convinced ourselves that it has.

Our team is split between the New Chapel Parish, who's basement we're living in, and Dorsey High School; one of the poorest performing schools in the country. I get to teach the kids algebra and geometry all day (ironic). Its really difficult because many of them have trouble with even basic arithmetic.

Most of the kids are actually really smart, but their attitudes get in the way. How do you convince a kid who has to worry about being stabbed on the way to his way home that geometry is important? They come from broken families and broken homes where they are forced to take on adult responsibilities far too early. They are never taught to respect people, to act civilly in society, to value education and prepare for their futures. As such, they have no problem talking back to teachers, walking out on class or simply refusing to do their schoolwork, and start down the path that will no pass on the same attitudes to their own children, just as they inherited them from their own parents without realizing it.

And because so many kids have no problems disrupting class, the teachers have to spend more time trying to maintain control than actually teaching. The lessons get lost, the kids don't learn and before you know it they're staring at a board of symbols and operations they don't even begin to understand. And then they shut down or act out even more. But thats where we come in: if we can sit down and talk with them one on one, and explain to them what is actually happening and why, then they see that its actually easy and become more interested. Nothing is quite so satisfying like watching that spark of understanding slowly spread over the face of a kid who thought it was astrophysics 10 minutes ago. And if they actually remember it enough to do it again the next day...what a great feeling!

Thats not to say that we're the answer to the schools problems. Most of the kids simply don't want to be helped and don't understand why furthering their education and learning how to act in the face of things they don't like or don't want to do, and a bunch of white kids from the government are not going to be the ones to change their minds. But we have to be there for the ones who do want help, and if we can reach just a few, then our time will not have been wasted.

Victory!

Hey, look, our video finally uploaded. Turns out HD stuff makes really huge files. Feel free to watch this on the biggest, highest definition screen you have so it was worth the wait time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTdukVTQX1s

How about that east coast weather? I went to the beach twice today. More on that later.

Loading

oh, hey.

So, it turns out that when my computer goes into standby, it shuts off the wifi, which in turn completely disrupts uploading movies to youtube and making you start over every time. In order to finish this thing I'd have to keep the computer from going to sleep. Between not having a power outlet handy and the slow internet making the upload take over a freaking hour, this is very difficult to do. Right now, it says 17 minutes left. I have my doubts.

In any case, the trip down to L.A. went well. It took about 6 hours. The first 4 sent us down the middle of California, also known as the Land of a Million Cows and No Hills. Seriously. It was flat and vacant the whole time, but pretty in its own way.

(I'd show you a picture right here and say "See?" beneath it, but it seems that even that is too much for this connection to handle. Use your imagination.)

We gradually made our way through the Santa Catalina (I think) mountains, which were really beautiful, and then down into the valley, with Los Angeles spread out before us.

L.A. is HUGE. the other cities I've spent any amount of time in, New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, and Sacramento; they all have distinct features, geographic and man-made, which help orient me and sort of set the city's boundaries. Not so here. It's just endless city in all directions, and I don't think I like it.

We're living in the basement of Chapel of Peace. Its kind of grungy, and we have to go outside and through like 3 doors which may or may not be locked to get to the bathroom. We have to drive 10 minutes to use the public showers at a nearby park. We sleep on cots. Its pretty cool and will make for an interesting 6 weeks. We're also working for Chapel of Peace, but they're not really sure what they want us to do, so I hope to work on project invention and execution on this project. Oh, and Inglewood isn't quite as bad as it once was, I'm told. Still not a place I'd walk around alone at night, or leave my stuff sitting in the car for any amount of time, but we're not going to get mugged on sight so rest easy, old folks.

Well I think this is enough of a check in for now. I really want to get some pictures and videos up so I don't want to get too much further into things until I can. Let's see, my video right now has...21 minutes left. Great. I'm going to cot.

slow moments.

OK, so I totally made a quick home video to post along with my blurb about traveling to LA, but between taking forever to render and foreverer to upload to youtube, this thing just isn't going to be available to link tonight. I'm gonna get some sleep and i'll have it ready to go tomorrow. Promise!