Every Thursday at three-fifty I shut the iron gate which stands at the entrance to my house. My hand brushes the flowers which are overgrown but still beautiful and not in any way unruly. I get into my car and drive for five minutes into a completely different world. APEX’s iron gate entrance is somewhat different. It seems colder. There are no little yellow flowers growing through the gate, but instead, hand drawn signs saying things like “No Guns or Other Weapons” and “No Drugs” written in crayon and markers.
I’ve only been to APEX three times but my experience is not at all what I thought it would be. I assumed that I would be helping the kids with their homework, talking to them, playing games with them, but that is not how things have turned out. My first day I talked to another volunteer for the first hour and then started reading The Clouds by Aristophanes. There were maybe five children at the facility and I was in a room where I was by myself. I felt like a ghost. My second experience was similar, and I managed to start and finish The Cay, a childhood favorite. The third day I went in I was doing office work, trying to remember how to use Excel and input information into the computer, completely in my own world. My interactions with the kids have been minimal. They seem disinterested in getting to know me and I am definitely an outsider. They run around shouting and their diction and rhetoric is unfamiliar. I have yet to adapt.
Talking in class on Tuesday was helpful, because I realized that others were struggling with me. I don’t really know my place at APEX yet, I haven’t found my niche. I really want to integrate myself into the community but these kids go everyday to this place and spend time together and its hard to find something to relate about. I am a lit. major but these kids don’t want to talk about Snorri, Shakespeare, Dickens, or anything of the sort but they are very much into video games and youtube videos. I don’t know anything about that and when I ask, they try to explain but they don’t really care, they are more focused on whatever they are doing.
The head of the program is great. I’ve talked to her a bit about the community, about the kinds of homes these kids come from, but it’s all things I knew or expected. I feel compelled to help in any way that I can, but I don’t even think that help is what these kids need. They are fine it seems. I don’t know what my purpose is at APEX yet. I feel like a glorified babysitter sometimes. I’m hoping to make more of this experience, I just don’t know how yet.
It seems like you and Taylor are having really similar experiences, though you may have had a bit more connection with the kids at APEX. One thing this post captures really well is that the threshold of the gate at APEX isn't the only cross-able limit in your SL experience. Your account of your first few days there shows other lines: between your reading and the kids' games and videos, between familiar and unfamiliar language, between your completely understandable desire to feel useful and the kids' apparent absorption in their own activities. These difference, like all others, have a history. What are those histories? Why are the lines so hard to cross? Does Shakespeare have anything to say about differences that drive people from one another?
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