Four-and-a-half-year-old Joey sat crouched by the doorway, dressed in a filthy T-shirt and blue jeans several sizes too big. Five minutes before I arrived on Joey's doorstep, he had watched an angry man steal into his one-room home with a club and bash in the skull of a man sleeping there, because of a dispute over some hooker.
The other children where Joey lives-at the misnamed "Royal Resort Kitchenettes" off of Van Buren, one of Phoenix’s main prostitution strips-have also witnessed horrors. Phoenix generally is clean, new, spread out, and orderly, but poverty hides here along narrow paths lined with oversized garbage cans that lead to seedy motels.
The clearest victims of Phoenix’s ghetto are children like Joey or 7-year-old Ashley, the daughter of a crack-addicted prostitute. Ashley several weeks ago was regularly dumped off at the house of an alcoholic neighbor. Floors in the house are covered by tattered furniture, heaps of old clothes, overflowing garbage cans, old beer cases, junked bicycles, rusted appliances, and omnipresent religious icons, pictures, and statues-but off to the left, in a tiny dark room, is an undersized, filthy bunk bed crammed in the corner. That's where Ashley slept…and it was an improvement over her past experience in cars and crack houses. It may also have been better than her current situation-Ashley now is working.
As Capitol Hill debates welfare reform this week, it is clear that millions of federal dollars and scores of government programs from above have had little positive effect on the entrenched, complex pathologies of the urban underclass. What hope there is comes through programs like Neighborhood Ministries, the community outreach arm of Open Door Fellowship, a nondenominational evangelical church on the west side of Phoenix that has clearly changed lives.
Neighborhood Ministries' outreach is broad ranging: It runs thrice-weekly evening youth programs; offers tutoring; works closely with local school administrators to support at risk families; operates a free food and clothing bank; provides biblical counseling services; organizes summer youth camps; and offers Spanish-language Bible study and Sunday morning worship. Several hundred inner-city kids and their families benefit regularly from these activities and services.
All of these programs address the many layered problems faced by Phoenix's ghetto kids. Even so, the programs take a back seat to the real focus of Neighborhood Ministries' outreach: fostering relationships. Recognizing that material poverty is simply the most readily observable sign of the children's suffering, and that emotional, psychological, and spiritual hungers lie not far beneath the surface, the church has focused on long-term, personal involvement with specific needy kids and their families.
Initially, the church intended to reach out specifically to its immediate vicinity. But given the extreme mobility of Phoenix's largely Hispanic underclass, Neighborhood Ministries came to see most of the city as its target. Children who once lived close by Open Door Fellowship and participated in the church's programs are now tracked as their families move about the city. On Monday and Wednesday evenings (when the main programs for kids take place on site) volunteers drive several church buses and vans throughout the city, picking up "the church's" kids.
When Kit Danley, who for 15 years has overseen Neighborhood Ministries, travels about town, she often spots a child and comments, "She's one of our kids." This sense of "ownership" and "family" gives the kids involved in Neighborhood Ministries the security of belonging, supplying a stability foreign to most other aspects of their lives. It also permits church volunteers to "bond" with specific children whom, over time, they hope to influence.
These highly mobile kids also find a longed-for safety inside church grounds in the company of familiar church volunteers. Usually, anyway. Sometimes the rude realities of the ghetto intrude, as when a gangster kid was shot down by a rival gang, some members of which attend the church's Monday night youth program. The victim's fellow gang members came cruising by one Monday night threatening a drive-by shooting, but they held off.
The prospect of drive-by shootings is an unsettling reality for youth group night at Open Door Fellowship-too unsettling for some parents. At one time, both the poor youth and the church's middle-class white kids all belonged to the same youth group. Four years ago Neighborhood Ministries had to split the older kids into two separate groups-a painful experience for Kit Danley, who wanted the suburbanite and inner-city kids to stay together.
Kit Danley's affection for ghetto kids is also a bit unsettling for her neighbors. Mrs. Danley, her husband Wayne (a painter and volunteer football coach), and their two teenage children reside just a block or so from the church in a well-lived-in ranch home with an invitingly disheveled, collegiate feel. It's a gathering point. Young blacks on Wayne's football team watch TV in the family room while Hispanics of all ages play basketball in the backyard and eat pizza or tamales in the kitchen. Some neighbors are not enthusiastic, but the Danleys' unassuming house is one immovable safe haven the wandering kids of the ghetto can call home.
Church volunteers who work with fifth- and sixth-grade girls in the church's "Kids Life" program are sometimes startled by the home conditions they find. One night when Libby Pierce drove a girl home after a church activity, "It was about 10:00 p.m. and the mom was making dinner. She was frying some tortillas and these roaches were… all over the stove where she was making the food, [but] it was just no big deal."
Despite the unsanitary conditions, at least this youngster would get some dinner. According to Lyetta Mathews, who directs the church's tutoring efforts for elementary school kids, many children do not get regular meals at home. "Most of them just sort of forage at home or at Circle K [a gas station convenience store]," she says with grim emphasis. Church volunteer Pat McCormick, who has worked with the same small group of boys for the past three years, says, "the family life of most of our kids ranges from neglect to abuse."
Ongoing relationships between the kids and church volunteers like Pierce and McCormick provide the children with a consistent love, affection, and acceptance. Mr. McCormick's regular commitment to his group of boys helps them to see that they are special. During basketball games, he affirms the boys' good passes and good defense. "It's just like medicine to them," Mr. McCormick asserts. "They don't hear that affirmation much at home."
The enormous amounts of love and attention required by these wounded kids, however, can prove overwhelming to some volunteers. Lyetta Mathews told me sadly that she had only one tutoring volunteer return from the previous year. "Sometimes it's hard to know if you're reaching the kids," she explains. "They'll 'beat up' on Mrs. X week after week, but one day when Mrs. X can't come, they get real upset. 'Where is she?' they'll plead. 'Why isn't she here?' Then you realize that you are important to them."
Many of the kids put up a tough front, because, as Libby Pierce puts it, "they have to distance themselves emotionally from so much." She tells of being at home with some kids while their mother tried to decide whether or not to send them to live with their grandmother.
"During the conversation, the kids seemed so disposable and I thought, 'My gosh, this is the ultimate in rejection.’”
Kit Danley doesn't let the rough front put up by some of the young toughs inhibit her. As we encounter kids in front of fast food stores, in school hallways, in beer-can-laden side lots, and even at the local juvenile jail, Mrs. Danley demonstrates an uncanny ability to remember the names and nicknames of dozens of children. She greets them warmly, always tousling their hair, squeezing their arms, giving them hugs-and even the guys who are candidates for the gangs accept her mothering.
Building strong friendships with impoverished children outside of their homes can help the kids substantially. But the church is also active in efforts to improve the children's home lives by reaching out to their parents. Many of the kids come from single-parent households (though this is less common among Latinos than among African-Americans). But the two-parent homes are often beset with problems too: chronic underemployment and wife-beating, for example, are rampant.
Open Door Fellowship does provide some material help to povertyicken families-the church operates an emergency free food and clothing bank-but this "relief" ministry is tied to the church's broader efforts to address underlying spiritual, emotional, and moral-cultural issues. For example, everyone who visits the food bank is briefly interviewed by a church volunteer in order to gain insight into the family's plight. A few parents have tried to take advantage of the church, but most, volunteer Belinda McBride says, have legitimate needs-and their work ethic is strong. "There's a great willingness among them to work for low pay," Kit Danley reports. "We've never had anyone turn down a job, unless it was impossible transportation-wise for them to get to it."
Follow-up is a problem. Clients' addresses are recorded so that volunteers can visit them at home, but Mrs. Danley has had trouble rounding up the volunteer visitors. She also has to find the right sort of volunteer: Some North Americans see a home visit as a perfunctory 15-minute chat while the Latinos expect at least a few hours of shared conversation around a plate of refreshments.
Unlike their counterparts at many secular-and Christian-food banks, volunteers at Neighborhood Ministries center are encouraged to discuss spiritual issues in their interviews with clients. Indeed, clients fill out a simple, brief form (in English and Spanish) that includes the question, "What is your relationship with God like?”, which helps prompt this kind of conversation. When volunteer Julianne Thompson asked that question of Patti Gualajara, who was married to an alcoholic and suffered physical and emotional abuse, a process began that led to Mrs. Gualajara joining the Wednesday night Bible study and eventually converting to the Christian faith. Now she is one of the most effective volunteers at the food bank, easily communicating with and relating to the women who come there.
In addition to trying to improve the slum children's current home lives through biblical counseling, teaching, and practical assistance for their parents, Neighborhood Ministries is also attempting to improve the kids' future prospects. This involves education, but even more importantly, a rekindling of the children's hope and imagination. Most of the kids have little of either.
When Johnny Lopez, a 14-year-old gang member who was one of Kit Danley's favorite kids, was found shot in the back in a lonely alley, he had already planned his funeral and provided appropriate instructions to his relatives. Mrs. Danley reports: "It's not unusual for 14-year-olds to know in detail what they want for their funerals. It's like the Anglo kid planning a wedding. People make a big deal over you. The dead get a lot of attention."
For kids like Johnny, such attention seems the best they can hope for. Tutor Lyetta Mathews describes the Christmas wish lists the children fill out: "They're all the same. Shoes, socks, shoes, clothes, shoes. No toys, no books, nothing to build, nothing to make." The kids have trouble hoping for anything beyond daily necessities.
"In school, kids get picked on if they're smart," Lyetta Mathews reports. "It's just not acceptable. To be cool is everything." Typically, being cool requires shutting down emotionally. For many kids, joining a gang is a very practical escape from life in a "compressed band of reality." Kids as young as 10 years old are often eager to enjoy the alternative "family" provided by gang life, and just as eager to capture the material benefits of the drug trade and other criminal activities in which the gangs are enmeshed.
"Some fifth and sixth graders are already carrying guns and know how to use a knife," reports Tony Mata, local director of the para-church youth ministry, Young Life, which partners with Neighborhood Ministries in reaching junior and senior high youth. At this stage, the kids get high by sniffing paint and recreate by "tagging" (scrawling gang names and slogans in graffiti on buildings and billboards). By junior high, gang members are stealing cars and making "beer runs" -one youth distracts a convenience store clerk while the other grabs a case of beer and runs out the door with it. "The Circle K people hardly ever chase after them," Mata says. "They know the kids carry guns." Before junior high is finished, kids will be involved in the lucrative businesses of faking auto accidents to collect insurance money and/or selling marijuana and crack.
Other ghetto kids reject the nihilistic materialism of gang life and try to escape their truncated worlds by exploring other-worldly realms. Lyetta Mathews describes the "subculture of superstition" she witnesses among the children. They are preoccupied with the occult, she reports, with tales of "Bloody Mary" (a Virgin Mary figure who prophesies the future), with "murdering clowns," and with the demons exalted in the lyrics of acid rock music. Undoubtedly the children get some of these ideas from home. Many Latino parents adhere to a polytheistic "Cristo-paganism" brought to the United States from their Latin American homelands.
Life in Phoenix's ghettos is removed from life in middle-class America, but it starkly shows the alternatives available to us all: self-absorption through materialism; self- "actualization" through various other-worldly spiritualisms; or self-transformation through the gospel. It's just that the ghetto is a microcosm in which the unfolding consequences of these varying paths are unveiled most starkly.
Churches like Open Door Fellowship are on the frontlines of the battle of the underside, trying to guide kids to the narrow path of the gospel. Often the gangs and the demons seem to be winning the war. Soldiers like Kit Danley have the joy of leading many slum children to God, but despite their best efforts, these urban soldiers also have to visit kids in jail, or worse, pay them final respects at graveside. Yet Mrs. Danley retains an unshakable hopefulness. In some mysterious, glorious way, it seems, by interweaving their lives with those of the underside's children, members of Open Door Fellowship have experienced something of Christ's resurrection-for they have allowed themselves to taste something of the fellowship of his sufferings.
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