What's a White Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?
Goldsmith, Suzanne
What's A White Girl Like You Doing In A Place Like This? Running a volunteer program for tough New York kids wasn't easy. But it was worth it. by Suzanne Goldsmith I was driving through a...
...He was eating a sugar donut...
...I did question Kenny and Dean, each alone, and Dean said he had seen Kenny with two $100 bills— the denomination stolen...
...After graduation, he learned that the colleges would not credit his Trinidadian high school diploma, so he took the equivalency exam—and failed...
...The team leaders go to camp the day before the recruits so that all is ready when they arrive...
...She had asked Mike to protect her...
...I was not used to this—in the first two months, I lost almost ten pounds because my stomach was in such knots that I simply couldn't eat...
...It's no Evel Knievel feat, but it does require overcoming your fear of jumping...
...Either I'd been fired or I must be a sucker...
...I did not feel the anguish over losing Kenny that I would feel over later separations...
...She's got big stomach ." Sometimes he called me Mommy...
...I said I thought that I should separate Susan...
...She dissolved into tears...
...It shows the others I mean business...
...Subie, you could say I have gotten attached to him...
...Our goal was to form a team in spirit as well as in name...
...They were in trouble for leaving early when he wasn't there...
...I was deeply hurt...
...The team voted, unanimously and in her presence, to separate her...
...within two weeks he'd been separated—Corps vernacular for fired...
...We had a party with lots of laughs and warmth...
...I would have to begin with rules— not reasoning, not democracy, just letting everybody know I was boss...
...And, more than any other volunteer I met, Harold had an exquisite sensitivity to injustice...
...How much money did I give her...
...Later, when Reggie formally introduced me to the team, he warned, "Kenny thinks he's real macho, God's gift to the ladies...
...I had to lie my ass off," he wrote, "and guess what...
...Each day the team, organized in pairs, trooped into the volunteer office of the hospital to collect train and bus tokens to commute to their assignments...
...They seemed relieved that she was gone...
...BeeBee: "I can't jump, Suzanne...
...I did not reconsider...
...You're white...
...Five minutes later, he re-emerged and leaned casually against the wall to watch us...
...Yolanda cried a good deal before stepping up into the interlaced fingers of her teammates...
...One morning I ran into Mike on the L train to Bushwick, and we talked about Lucy as we rode together for a couple of stops...
...To promote esprit de corps, the volunteers are required to wear a uniform...
...Our cargo, flour, powdered milk, rice, and cheese, was going to the elderly and handicapped who could not go shopping...
...Once, when she was angry with me, she put on her Walkman and began singing loudly, finally jumping up on a dumpster and dancing in a frenzy...
...I suppose his nose was broken, for he bled profusely, but he probably felt little...
...that was my father...
...Zina was seven months pregnant—she could no longer wear her uniform pants...
...Those who had heard of Harvard felt sure I could be earning more money elsewhere...
...I fired him...
...Push them...
...Lucy combined a surprising maturity with bouts of extreme childishness...
...I didn't see that last week ." Some of the reactions were against me: "Woulda never happened if Reggie was here...
...A woman we worked with once said to him, "Harold, you are a righteous brother...
...They chose "no N.B.O.s"?Xthey would help each other make it through the seven days...
...Tony, like all CVs, was required to keep a journal...
...A few weeks after I started, Rick decided to quit the Corps and get a job...
...It was a grim moment, but it was a milestone...
...He brought it across Lucy's father's face with a crack that would echo in my head for weeks afterward...
...Sheridan's house the day she was robbed, I called a team meeting and everyone trooped into a small room...
...He could not get along with the team and often showed up late, or not at all...
...On Wednesday it was his birthday, he made 86 years...
...The room in which we held our meetings was also used to store the candy the children were selling to raise money for the school...
...But the search was not in vain...
...While he vacuumed floors his partner, Rhonda, often sat and fanned herself, or dozed...
...At 17, she had a two-yearold child, Liliana, whom she talked about incessantly...
...A quarter I can see—but $200...
...Donut argue with me My first day in the field, I was issued my own uniform: gray polyester chinos, heavy work boots, a baseball cap, gray bomber jacket, a red belt, and a red pin-striped shirt with an apple-shaped logo and epaulets to denote my rank...
...I think I was more conscious of the violation of their privacy than they were...
...They had to do most of the work for her?Xthe emotional effort of putting herself in that situation was so great...
...When we got to jumping jacks, he would only bounce a little in place...
...On the first morning, we heard the three buses honk their horns just before they got to camp...
...I marveled again when he showed me what he'd written about his visits to another Park Slope home: "I like Mr...
...I felt sick—I was not accustomed to being under suspicion...
...I didn't like his way of maintaining order...
...See, Suzanne...
...On Fridays, Lucy would cash her stipend immediately and buy Pampers...
...Being alone is bad not having no one to talk to, to hold, to love or laugh with" I lost track of Tony after he graduated...
...I was assigned 17 recruits, all new to one another...
...Reece called me a month after he graduated to confess, sheepishly, that he had already spent his entire $2,500: he'd bought a bicycle, some gold, some leather pants...
...In the end, I did feel that national service can promote these democratic values: we did become a community, and we did serve...
...In those early days Rick, the serious one who had demonstrated P.T...
...The last time we spoke, he told me he had signed up for the: auxiliary police force...
...The next day, however, I scored a minor victoryReggie-style...
...The girls eyed me nervously and shifted from foot to foot, but they were cooperative...
...I quit my job and moved to New York...
...I called a team meeting and explained what I had heard...
...All were white, and many were immigrants from northern Europe...
...We walked out to Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and Reggie sat on a wall to watch while Rick led them through a series of halfhearted stretches and calisthenics...
...He thinks he's gonna have an easy time now he's got a lady team leader...
...CVC, which in 1985 was only a year old, bills itself as a model national service program...
...It was bitterly cold, and he had only a thin winter jacket...
...On most training teams, there is at least one tall athlete for whom this is no sweat...
...Crime and punishment My last CVC project had us tutoring elementary school children at P.S...
...The next day I apologized to Kenny for being short with him, and said I wanted to be friends, "just not that kind ." He beamed and thrust out his hand to shake...
...The first thing he did when we met, in the elevator at Methodist Hospital, was check my hands to see if I was married...
...a few of us even cried...
...Until then, I hadn't realized that Lucy had orchestrated the whole event...
...America, but reading Moynihan and Harrington reminded me that my knowledge of the other America was, at best, second-hand...
...After Kenny's theft, the hospital we were working out of—providing assistance to homebound seniors—considered discontinuing the project, but they decided to give us another chance...
...Lucy stood rooted to the spot, eyes wide...
...team was manning voter registration booths in Bushwick, one of Brooklyn's most destitute neighborhoods...
...One day when Rene was absent, I went out as Tony's partner...
...a recent immigrant who cried one night out of fear that his grandmother, still in Haiti, was under attack...
...Since then, he has been living at home doing construction work and preparing to take the exam again...
...Rene looked at me, looked sorrowfully at his halfeaten donut, then stuffed it in his jacket pocket and started running...
...The clients were mostly single women, a few couples...
...Kenny did not confess...
...All eyes turned to me...
...My girlfriend's 27," he said...
...He prayed for the strength to stick with it...
...I had been doing research for a documentary program on poverty in Suzanne Goldsmith is a New York writer...
...As we were waiting our turns, I noticed Reece standing apart from the group, his head bowed against a tree...
...I was at the wheel of a 12-passenger van loaded with a couple of tons of USDA surplus food and ten members of the City Volunteer Corps...
...I had not mastered the van, and at a difficult corner I brushed fenders with a car that had pulled into my blind spot...
...Susan is in college now, studying social work...
...I ain't finish my breakfast ." "It's too late for breakfast now...
...He had served time on Riker's Island for repeated grafitti offenses...
...There were times when Lucy showed tremendous strength—and the quality of her work was impeccable...
...Mike was reinstated in the Corps...
...They had to walk between us?Xthe idea was to intimidate any troublemakers and prevent anyone from stashing drugs in the woods where they could retrieve them after the baggage search...
...Are you planning to join us...
...He got a surprise: the doors of the van flew open, and five menacing teenagers piled out and surrounded him...
...By using the carrot rather than the stick, I imagined I would make the volunteers want to do good...
...The lock on my closet's broken and if I don't wear it, my brother will steal it," he said...
...He wrote in his journal once that Lucy had told on him to his girl...
...In this case it was doubly illicit, since both Mike and Lucy were already parents...
...On our team, as on most, there was also one extremely overweight volunteer who had to face down many fears and who required both the emotional and physical support of the team to "make it...
...Put it away...
...After a long and painful trial, Susan was found guilty...
...some seemed quite well off...
...You oughta talk to Dean," Nancy said...
...Rene, a former Puerto Rican gang member who had hung up his colors and claimed to have been born again, arrived 15 minutes late, after we had all begun P.T...
...I reported the incident to my supervisor, who reported it to the director of operations...
...When I last spoke with her, she was working the phones for Sears, Roebuck...
...The Corps contained about 700 volunteers when I joined...
...She suggested a generous slathering of Vaseline...
...I started them on 150 counts of running in place and walked over to Rene...
...Later that day, Brown and Nancy pulled me aside...
...On the next-to-last day of camp, the team was scheduled to meet the "zip wire"?Xa much-touted challenge...
...he was just trying to protect Lucy...
...We'll take care of you" It was the fall of 1985 and I was a team leader in the City Volunteer Corps (CVC...
...But make no mistake, it was bruising...
...They were shocked...
...I got my ministration ." I decided it would take time for my enthusiasm to rub off...
...Unlike most, she placed no magic trust in me because of my white face...
...Years old ." The others simply stared...
...I always N.B.O...
...She had not told him that the man was her father...
...I hear she had a second baby, by the same father as the first...
...Suzanne, pale and younglooking, with bright red hair, sat outside the circle against the wall...
...I had wonderful visions of my own style of leadership being different—firm but friendly, hands-on, leading by example...
...With a stipend so low, most live at home, but the big incentive is the promise of a $5,000 scholarship or $2,500 in cash if they stay a year...
...wings...
...You can have anything you want" The words were like blows, but I was, as earlier I might not have been, able to sort out my guilt feelings from her guilt...
...Lucy giggled about it in front of the others and acted incredulous but somehow let me know there was more to the story, so I followed her when she went to the ladies' room...
...It involves strapping yourself into a harness, climbing a 50-foot ladder, then jumping off a platform to glide along a wire stretched 300 feet across a lake...
...Later, to my surprise, he said, "I'm sorry I said that" I nearly cried...
...Suspicious of Kenny: "Where'd you get that gold necklace...
...Afterward she was resplendent...
...The Dragon Lady's stains Kenny wasn't around long...
...In succeeding days, individuals would seek me out and tell me how sick they had become of covering up for Susan's lies and petty thefts...
...And then she began screaming, with tears streaming down her face, "It was your own fault...
...And you...
...I let them decide...
...Similar programs have subsequently spread to other cities, including Boston and Philadelphia...
...When I returned, she counted her change carefully, then looked up...
...He slunk off angrily, and I felt ashamed...
...I had a couple of days to observe Reggie before taking over...
...This caused small rebellions: "accidentally" spilling paint on the sleeves, refusing to hem the pants, tearing off the logo...
...After I sat with him for a long while, he finally spoke, in a rough whisper...
...No wonder they won't put any energy into it, I thought, if he won'tdo it himself...
...another found the experience so trying that he cursed at one of the trainers...
...My assignment was to take over Team 17, whose leader, Reggie, had suddenly resigned...
...Since graduating from college a few years earlier, I had been working at a public television station...
...Don't worry about it," Tony said as we headed down to the laundry...
...After questioning both of the boys who had been in Mrs...
...Over time however, they grew to understand that, despite their dark faces, the volunteers were not hoodlums...
...Later that day he sidled up to me, put his arm around me, and murmured, "We gonna be real good friends" Sharply, I returned, "You better watch it...
...I tried to distract him...
...In later instances, I found that in most cases teammates would back one another up—even lie for each other...
...Most lived in small walkup apartments, in neighborhoods up and down the south side of Brooklyn: Park Slope, Sunset Park, Bay Ridge...
...I never had people pulling for me like this...
...The CVs got only $80 a week...
...While one of the Corps's stated goals was to recruit volunteers of all economic backgrounds and ethnic groups, 96 percent were black or Hispanic, most from poor neighborhoods...
...Reggie obliged, but by the team's response I got the impression that they did not do it very often...
...City Volunteers (CVs) work full time for a year in teams of 10 to 15...
...Tony, who was small and also hard-working and wanted to become a cop, was paired with Rene, the ex-gang member with the temper...
...Our client was a woman we called "the Dragon Lady," since she was impossible to please...
...We had broken the code of silence...
...Mike's big stick Harold was one of five members of my training team who joined my permanent team back in New York City...
...Months earlier, in the confessional atmosphere of training camp, Lucy told me that when she was pregnant with Liliana, she had traveled out to a housing project in Coney Island where her grandmother lived to get her father's address...
...at least one," said one T.L., referring to the training staff's policy of sending those who break the rules on the Next Bus Out...
...I began to protest, just as Tony reentered the room...
...Suddenly, Kenny's gold-toothed smile was a danger...
...Would you be ashamed...
...The first day, he delivered a harangue that lasted 90 minutes...
...said Reece, the one with the muscles...
...I had no idea how much discipline my job would require, or how I would hurt when a graduate from my team squandered a bonus on gold jewelry instead of saving it for college or wound up jobless or on crack...
...I asked him to look me in the eyes and tell me he didn't take the money...
...Fat chance...
...The rest take the cash in lump sum, many cashing their checks the day they receive them...
...397 in East Flatbush...
...Of all the CVs, Dean was the most beloved by his clients...
...In a moment, Mike was gone...
...The man crumpled in a doorway...
...said one, flexing his muscles...
...That's messed up...
...It was her eleventh month, and I had come to believe that she would graduate...
...Several CVs spoke up, and said that was unfair—I hadn't seen Susan take the candy...
...a woman who had grown up on a New Mexico Indian reservation, moved with her mother and her own baby to Queens, served time on Riker's Island for throwing a home-made pipe bomb into a housing project, and joined the Corps to get her act together...
...had impressed me with stories of being challenged by the new recruits and demonstrating their toughness...
...Like other youth corps throughout the country, it recruits young people to do public service work for little pay, but with the promise of other rewards: solid work experience, scholarship money, and a chance to care for others...
...Would you be mad...
...While "cohabitation" was frowned upon in the Corps, it was always a strong possibility...
...Rhonda was asleep...
...I don't need to look, Suzanne...
...Some had had minor, or not-sominor, brushes with the law...
...I knew the story and also what Mike didn't know: that the man was Lucy's father...
...If I saw these situations as a test of their loyalty to me, or of how well my admonitions to honesty had penetrated, I was usually disappointed...
...I fired Harold for striking out at a white woman who "dissed" him—showed him disrespect...
...You went to Harvard...
...Most often, however, I was a sister, and we got along best when I gossiped with her and entertained her suggestions on how to do my hair...
...Mike, like Harold, had grown up in a tough neighborhood: Crown Heights, Brooklyn...
...BeeBee was big and striking...
...One young man had a vial of crack in his bag...
...I got a loose stomach ." Rhonda did arm circles like she had a pair of broken Later, I would learn to recognize pregnancies by one of the earliest symptoms: an open clasp on the snugly cut uniform pants...
...Meekly, the driver backed away and got back in his car...
...I don't know what went on in that team meeting, and I can only guess that Kenny had never achieved the trust of the team...
...The baggage search was one of the most depressing experiences I had in my year as team leader or in the subsequent 17 months I spent as an administrator in the Corps...
...Can't do those...
...A report reached me that Susan had been stealing boxes of the candy—this after having been suspended three times and having lied to me on countless other occasions...
...Many were upwardly mobile, recent immigrants from the Caribbean, Central America, or Southeast Asia who saw the Corps as an Americanizing experience—and a place to learn English...
...They asked me to leave the room...
...Another 13 percent take part cash and part scholarship...
...She does that all the time" I folded clothes and watched Tony earnestly scrubbing the Dragon Lady's stained and yellowing garments...
...Susan could testify, as could her accusers, and the team could vote on her guilt or innocence, and determine her punishment...
...Especially on Fridays because he always says now I'm going to be alone again...
...She didn't give me enough change," snarled the Dragon Lady...
...Fat chance...
...Tony was young and eager-looking, with a skimpy moustache...
...A man was following her, calling drunkenly...
...she asked Tony...
...I tried to console him...
...Of those who do graduate, only 6 percent take the full scholarship option...
...Even so, when I began at CVC only a quarter lasted a full year...
...The first night, I asked the group to set a goal for the week...
...When Mike and I got off the train at Bushwick Avenue that morning, we saw Lucy walking toward us from the other end of the platform...
...Another bent to examine a dent on the man's fender...
...Rene kept shifting in his chair and making exasperated faces...
...One girl had washed everything she owned and packed it wet?Xpresumably she did not have access to a dryer...
...The next one to leave did not go voluntarily...
...Perhaps she had not realized it either...
...Mayor Koch, who started the program, had envisioned CVC as a social equalizer, but college-bound whites were not beating a path to CVC's door...
...Not everyone wanted to get over...
...They were a motley crew...
...The man followed me down the rickety stairway...
...She sometimes visits the CVC office and we chat amicably...
...I left him as soon as an ambulance had been called...
...One hundred-thirty teenagers rolled off the buses, looking dazed and carsick, and traipsed down the path where we were stationed every six feet...
...As they rounded the bend, we moved out in formation...
...Susan, as well as the others, agreed this was fair...
...by Suzanne Goldsmith I was driving through a desolate Brooklyn neighborhood one day when a group of tough-looking black teenage males rescued me from what appeared to be certain death at the hands of an angry motorist...
...New to the Corps, he wrote in his journal that the team was too immature and that he felt out of place...
...Because she was cool (she wore the right jewelry...
...By the time I went to camp, I was more fearful than excited...
...she knew where the parties were), Susan was popular on the team, and they tolerated her laziness and dishonesty...
...He re-enrolled in his high school, then dropped out again...
...Sometimes I would pay a surprise visit to find Dean doing jobs he had not even been asked to do: washing a floor that he had washed only three days earlier...
...Brown: "You gotta get them apart...
...Lucy's parents had been estranged since she was small...
...I have some friends on the team . . . if they were to get a real job and the employer told them to do something they don't like, they might get fired...
...We all hugged...
...I had a lot of that mist in me too when I joined CVC, but I soon learned that "community" and "service" meant reining in the restless and the rageful: firing volunteers for being absent, for stealing, or for acts of violence...
...He was twice my size and carried a physical education degree and a don't-mess-with-me attitude...
...She said that what had happened was her fault...
...There's at least a dollar missing," she said...
...My instincts told me Kenny had taken the money, but I was afraid to play the arbiter...
...Some were very poor...
...Perhaps it was a relief to her, too—finally to be told she could not get over all the time...
...Mike, who considered himself a ladies' man, was surprised when I told him I was only 25 years old...
...Once down, I turned to him, just as Mike appeared from around the corner of an abandoned building, carrying a long, splintered wooden plank...
...he said...
...The two went on the Next Bus Out...
...I feel bad when we leave...
...Mike said that Lucy had been bothered by a man at the subway station the previous day and had asked him to stay near her...
...She sent me to the store to pick up some frozen vegetables and fabric softener...
...Most of them were afraid of the City Volunteers...
...Harold leaped at her, screaming obscenities...
...All but one were black or Hispanic...
...He had stolen money from an old lady while dusting her bureau...
...Later, I would learn to recognize pregnancies by one of the earliest symptoms: an open clasp on the snugly cut uniform pants...
...I asked Reggie to show me how the team did P.T.—daily physical training was a required feature of life in the Corps...
...All New York City teenagers between the ages of 17 and 20 qualified if they had no criminal charges pending and cleared a drug test...
...Rene raised his voice...
...I wanted to get closer...
...He has saved $8,000 toward college...
...They included a boy who was taking a year off from the City University to gain direction and a scholarship...
...Mike was in a sort of shock—he couldn't believe the man whose face he had smashed was his girlfriend's father...
...The driver, large and threatening, jumped out and began pounding on my window...
...Supporters of national service programs can turn misty-eyed about the values of "community" and "service" such programs are meant to instill...
...He was also often nasty, rude, and full of rage...
...They barely tried to follow...
...She had the right of way...
...I got out of it ." Lucy was pretty and sassy, Puerto Rican, with long, shining black hair...
...Either put it away and join us now, or go home...
...Dean wrote me a piece of advice...
...And why would I leave a glamorous TV job...
...Rene dropped out of CVC' after six months...
...He posI had wonderful visions of my style of leadership—firm but friendly, hands-on, leading by example...
...I miss my girl, and I want to go back, but it's not like this in Brooklyn ." The team made their goal of no N.B.O.s, and at the graduation ceremony they were recognized for that accomplishment...
...Some were fathers and mothers on public assistance...
...Dean had joined the Corps almost immediately upon his arrival in the U.S.—in fact, his mother, who was living in New York, had signed him up while he was still with his father in Trinidad...
...Others had very few clothes: a couple of shirts, a thin sweater, one pair of pants...
...She looked gray...
...It was your own fault...
...Lucy used her $1,000 "readjustment allowance" to buy a bedroom set for Liliana...
...But others used their meager stipend—$80 a week—to have it professionally cleaned and pressed...
...By using the carrot rather than the stick, I imagined I would make the volunteers want to do good...
...The previous day, Lucy had breathlessly told me a man in the station had harassed her, said she was his daughter, and that she had stolen his wallet...
...We worked out elaborate charts that plotted each client's schedule and needs, as well as each CV's class times...
...We stared at each other...
...He saw Kenny with a lotta money...
...He had a fashionable Louis Vuitton suit of denim lined with leather, and one warm day in April he came to paint a mile-long park fence wearing a fur jacket...
...Tony pulled out his journal and a pencil, and I handed him the receipt...
...As for why I was there, some of them wondered...
...He glanced at the team and walked inside...
...Harold told me he would have expected me to take the white person's side...
...Soon after, Mike and Lucy both reached their sixth month in the Corps...
...Dean completed a year in the Corps...
...They decided that Mike should be separated for a "criminal act" Three weeks later, Lucy telephoned the director of operations...
...I got a chance to look some of the players over...
...The camp, a remote huddle of cabins in the Catskills, is not only a training ground but a place to screen out volunteers who don't have what it takes...
...The next day, with Reggie gone, I led the team myself in exercises I remembered from, of all places, the Harvard fencing team...
...I marveled...
...for me, often led the exercise sessions...
...I had hoped to go there before beginning my field service, but instead I was given a team to supervise immediately and was not trained until three months later...
...We saw only one white woman all day...
...I can see out of the corner of my eye...
...Harold asked me, one day when we were giving an iron fence in Kissena Park a fresh coat of black paint, how I would feel if the black paint spilled on my white skin...
...They dropped out, despite their initial intentions of staying a year...
...Eight dollars," he remembered...
...In addition to fixing up parks and buildings, volunteers tutor in schools, assist the frail elderly, help the handicapped, and feed the homeless...
...She was hauled limply over the top by Reece, who was sitting atop the wall...
...Brown, who had nappy hair and wore a large pendant in the shape of Africa, kept raising his hand to ask irrelevant questions...
...Brown stood backwards...
...I tried to convince him to stay, but secretly I felt he had made a wise decision...
...Kenny had made me awkward from the start...
...They also go to school at night, either preparing for college, for the high school equivalency exam, or studying English or basic literacy...
...They called each other "homeboy"—they came from the same neighborhood—and Tony was often the only one who could calm Rene down...
...Somehow, an altercation developed between Harold and this woman, who looked like a schoolmarm, and she, defiant, ripped up her registration form...
...Seventy-five percent were high school dropouts...
...She had narrowed her uniform pants to make them tightfitting, and during Reggie's tirade she peered into a pocket mirror and adjusted her eye makeup...
...Mike disappeared...
...I went out, and Brown asked me to close the door...
...The pants were too long, so I hemmed them with scotch tape...
...He did the calculations, and the Dragon Lady was satisfied...
...Twenty suitcases had to be dismantled entirely?Xsocks unrolled, pants pockets and hems checked, bras and panties fingered and squeezed, jars and bottles sniffed and scrutinized...
...Those who had gone over could not help those who had not, so the last person had to scale the wall in a flying leap...
...He tugged at her necklace, grabbed her purse, and threw it on the track...
...I called it breaking the homeboy barrier—the tendency to protect your buddies, even when they are wrong...
...One of the first challenges was to get the whole team over a 13-foot wall, without ropes or ladders...
...Later, Susan telephoned me, and, sobbing hysterically, she begged me to reconsider...
...It's that man," she said, and looked away...
...The TV work took me to neighborhoods like Roxbury and Hyde Park, Boston, but only for fleeting visits...
...Unlike most other youth corps, which focus on backwoods conservation, CVC was designed to test youth service in an urban center...
...That's old, man...
...I would abide by their decision...
...Roughly half of those who leave are asked to do so...
...and a girl who, despite endless counseling, had dropped out of high school...
...the other half drop out...
...Despite the fact that his girlfriend was pregnant, Mike fell for another member of the team, named Lucy...
...He lived with his mother and many of his ten brothers and sisters in the Bronx...
...Later, I heard he was driving a van for his church "I miss my girl" Camp Wel-Met, the Parris Island of CVC, is where team leaders and volunteers get their training...
...sessed a glorious smile and a talent for comedy...
...I always went to the home to introduce the volunteers on the first visit, and, in the first weeks of the project, they often called the Home Care office to request me as a volunteer...
...How you expect me to exercise without eating nothing...
...He did...
...I think you shouldn't let no one get over...
...I thought for a minute, then discarded the temptation to reason with him...
...Over the next week, I heard the accusations from others on the team, and when a count was taken, several boxes of candy were indeed missing...
...When he saw her, however, he had cursed at her and said she was not his child...
...in front of the hospital...
...You don't know what it's like, Suzanne," she said...
...He seemed too far gone to be dangerous...
...Tony had to hold him back...
...Some of the trainees had packed as if for several months' stay...
...Ten to 20 percent of the recruits ask to leave, or are told to, during what one team leader called "a seven-day stress test ." After a full year in the Corps, if you ask the grads what they are proudest of, many will tell you, "Making it through training ." In fact, for my first three months, I lacked authority in some volunteers' eyes because I had not yet met the test...
...Mike now works in a midtown Manhattan mailroom and studies electrical installation at night...
...The more boastful team leaders (T.L...
...Today, 33 percent complete the program...
...I thought perhaps he was beginning to suffer from frostbite, or perhaps he was frightened of the zip...
Vol. 20 • June 1988 • No. 5
