Day 57 - Bunny

Image by Raleene, via Flickr

While I was one of about 40 volunteers in New Jersey with the Christian Neighborhood Summer Program during the summer of 1968, there were several local high school students assigned to work with us. They were part of the Job Corps, a program administered by the United States Department of Labor that offers free-of-charge education and vocational training to youth ages 16 to 24. Three high school students were assigned to work at the church where I worked. One of the three, Bernice, Bunny for short, worked with me.

One of the first things I learned from Bunny and the other two young women was the vast differences in the versions of English we all spoke. For example, in my dialect, the two words berry and bury and the name Barry are pronounced the same. But in New Jersey, those three words have completely different vowels. Berry rhymes with very. Bury rhymes with jury. And the first vowel in Barry is completely foreign to me. It requires my jaw dropped lower when speaking the name than for any other word. Other names rhyme with it: Cary, Gary, Harry, Larry, and Mary, but not Jerry, Kerry, Perry, Sherry, or Terry.

Another lesson I learned from Bunny and the others was the importance of context. I was surprised by all the litter I saw on the streets in New Jersey, so I thought it would be fun, even instructive, to set up a game that would both clean up the immediate neighborhood and make a point about the importance of keeping litter off the street. So I constructed a scavenger hunt. I made four lists of items that could be found on the street but that didn't belong there: in other words, litter. I broke my class into four groups, gave each one a list and sent them on their way to collect the items.

After about 15 minutes, all four teams were back with their bags full of litter. I was feeling rather smug as I said that they didn't have to go very far to find the items on the list, did they. I saw Bunny's face when I said that and her expression was curious. One of the boys responded that I was wrong. They had to go all the way to the end of the block to find the gum wrapper. At that, I saw Bunny nod her head slightly.

Next I had the kids draw a picture of their houses. When they were done, I told them to glue what they had collected on their pictures. Most of them just did what I told them. But one boy got it. He looked up at me and said he didn't want to do that because it would make his house ugly. Then he did something that made my heart sing. He drew a garbage can in the corner of the picture and he pasted all his litter on the can.

Bunny also taught me how to cross streets in New Jersey. Most important was not to wait at the corner for the light to change. It was important to look both directions - no all four directions - and if it was clear, to go.

Bunny thought it was ironic that she was younger than I was, but she knew more than I did about how to get around. The next summer I was able to reverse things. Bunny came to Minnesota for a week in August. And that time I was the teacher. I kept her from crossing the street against the lights, even though there were no cars coming. I reminded her not to throw things onto the street. And I translated when our funny Minnesota accents confused her.

Day 55 - Flying

Image by puddy_UK, via Flickr

Being at the airport between flights reminds me of the first time I ever flew anywhere. It was June 1968 and I flew on standby from Fargo, ND, to Newark, NJ, where I spent seven weeks as a volunteer with the Christian Neighborhood Summer Program in Jersey City, New Jersey. The program reimbursed the volunteers for the cost of a bus ticket to Jersey City, up to a limit of $100. A standby ticket on Northwest Airlines at that time cost $77, so I chose that method to travel.

Another college student from Moorhead also flew on that plane. She smoked and in those days I don't think there was even any smoking vs non-smoking section or if there was, I ended up sitting next to her anyway. She was a year older and the daughter of one of my dad's good friends, but I didn't spend any time with her in New Jersey because eight of us ended up working in two smaller suburbs, Weehawken and Union City, instead.

When we arrived in Jersey City, we were brought to the basement of a church where cots had been set up as the girls' dormitory. Most of the volunteers were girls; the boys all ended up staying with one of the pastors involved in the program. Immediately on putting down our suitcases, a few of us grabbed cameras and headed up the steps to begin exploring Jersey City. It didn't take as long as the length of time we needed to walk to the corner of the block for us to realize that walking on the streets with cameras around out necks made us stick out unacceptably, so we headed back to the church basement to put the cameras away.

At about that time, the two pastors from the Lutheran churches in Union City and Weehawken arrived to pick up the eight of us who had been designated to work in those churches, about 8 blocks apart, instead of remaining in Jersey City. I don't know how they picked which of us would stay in Union City, but I was one of them.

The two pastors were brothers-in-law. Pastor Hank's wife was Pastor Gary's sister. Gary was single, but he lived in a four bedroom house next to his church and that became our dormitory instead of the church basement. Gary stayed with his sister and Pastor Hank for the seven weeks.

The four bedrooms of the house were all upstairs. It was as though there had been a very large room up there that was divided into fourths, with doorways only into the two rooms nearest the stairway. Two of the bedrooms could only be reached by going through one of the other rooms. It must have been my introversion that led me to claim the single bed in the room in the furthest corner. It was the only room with a single bed, the only room where only one of us could stay. The others had multiple beds, including, if my memory isn't playing tricks on me, one room with bunk beds.

Our accommodations were significantly more comfortable than what the rest of the girls had in that church basement. We also had better food. One of the members of Gary's church, Vannie, walked her German Shepherd dog to the house every morning in order to make us breakfast. She also put out bread and sandwich makings for us to make up our lunches. And in the evening, she had dinner prepared for us when we got back from our classes. I was introduced to an entirely different cuisine during that summer. Vannie, in spite of being a strong Lutheran, cooked a lot of Italian food. My favorite was veal parmesan. Vannie made a pan of baked veal parmesan with 12 pieces of veal the first time. The eight of us devoured them. The next time, she made two pans with 12 pieces of veal each. The eight of us devoured those as well.

The one treat I came to appreciate was very unassuming, so initially I wasn't all that excited when I saw it being passed around for dessert. It was pound cake. Just plain yellow pound cake. But I quickly learned that it was a good idea to volunteer to wash the dishes on the days we had pound cake because that meant I would be able to have another piece, or two, while helping to clean up the kitchen.

Vannie also introduced us to a new birthday tradition. Her birthday was during the time we were at the church, so she made each of us a knitted pair of slippers as her birthday present to us. She didn't want any presents from anyone, but she liked the idea of celebrating her birthday by giving others presents. Having Vannie as our surrogate grandmother (she was in her 70's) was a nice benefit of the program.

It was while in New Jersey that I realized what I wanted to do with my life. Most of the children in Union City and Weehawken were immigrants, and most of those were from Cuba. Most of their parents didn't speak much English and some of the children also were uncomfortable speaking English. We had the children act out some Bible stories for their parents at a program on the last evening. The boy who played Jesus was sick the day we rehearsed the play, so one of the high school girls who helped us stood in for Jesus. One of the boys whose English was weakest was given just one line and he was to address that line to Jesus. Because he had practiced with the high school student, when the time came the evening of the program for him to speak his line, he walked to the edge of the stage and looked out until he found the high school student in the front row and spoke his line directly to her.

I had always known I wanted to do something with foreign languages. I was studying both German and Russian at college in preparation. But that summer I realized I didn't have to learn a foreign language - I already spoke one, English. When I returned to Minnesota from New Jersey, I changed my major from German to English and then set out to take as many non-literature-based English courses as I could to prepare myself for teaching English as a Foreign Language. No one in Minnesota had much of an idea of what I wanted to do. Children who couldn't speak English well in the schools in my home town were put into remedial reading classes, not ESL classes. It took many more years for Minnesota to catch on to the need for teaching English as a second language to immigrant children instead of having them shunted off into separate classes with labels such as "special" or "remedial" in front of them.