Confronting racial differences. Embracing diversity. Ministering to the poor. Teaching and being taught. The interns at the Tampa Urban Project are on a mission from God.
By KEISHA I. PATRICK
Published July 29, 2003
[Times photos: John Pendygraft]
From left, Christine Otero, Lori Fey and Ruth Malberg pray together during a prayer walk through Robles Park in Tampa. The women were among the Tampa Urban Project missionary program participants.
From left, Latoria Johnson, Jamie Gatheright, Kevisha Hunter and Samaria McMillan dance during Art Camp at Robles Park. Interns from the Tampa Urban Project program ran the camp.
Joe Ella Darby, 26, gets a high five from Samaria McMillan during Art Camp.
TAMPA - "Thank you, Lord, for bringing us here and showing us that America isn't what we think it is." - Christine Otero's prayer during a prayer walk in Robles Park.
Many of them saw America as a land flowing with milk and honey, a land of endless opportunity available to all regardless of race. They wanted to extend their hands to the poor to help them see things more clearly, to help them see Jesus.
These 35 college students and eight staff members of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, an international campus ministry, came from as far west as California and as far north as Minnesota. From June 15 until last Friday, they ran an art camp for children in Robles Park, pitched in at nonprofit agencies and prayed with neighbors.
No cars, credit cards or cell phones could be found among this group. Such items are privileges few of America's urban poor have. So, the interns rode the city bus and lived off $15 a week.
The 43 interns - 30 white, seven black, five Asian and one Hispanic - shared four houses in Ybor Heights. Each house had one bathroom, one phone line, one stereo and one TV.
They thought they had come to minister. But something happened along the way. As the weeks passed, they were forced to confront America's racial issues and their own stereotypes. They began to dig up their subconscious prejudices and embark on journeys of self-improvement. The people they came to minister to actually ministered to them.
Art Camp
Fred Tucker, 8, holds a small book of multicolored construction paper. He's supposed to write about himself. But he doesn't know what to write.
"You have to tell me what you like about yourself," Joe Ella Darby, 26, tells him.
Fred sits with a half-smirk, half-smile on his face.
"You can say that you like your soft brown skin," Joe Ella says. She lightly touches Fred's arm and then her arm, showing him that they both have brown skin. Fred still doesn't budge.
Finally, he says, "Black is beautiful." Joe Ella smiles.
Joe Ella is an InterVarsity staffer at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She's here to find out whether urban ministry is her calling.
"I've always been drawn to young black kids for them to know their identity and be affirmed in it," she says. "They need to see positive black role models so they can see themselves."
It doesn't bother her when Fred giggles and points to the wall. Turns out he had lifted the "Black is beautiful" phrase from a sign hanging in front of him.
Though she thinks it's okay for white people to minister to kids such as Fred in predominantly black neighborhoods, Joe Ella says it's essential for black missionaries to be there, too.
Joe Ella grew up in Mason, Tenn., a rural town near Memphis. Her father raised his family there because he didn't want his kids to be exposed to the type of inner city he saw growing up in New Orleans, she says.
Mason had its own issues. When Joe Ella was in elementary school there were "race fights" every year on the last day of school. The black kids and white kids would meet at the flagpole and fight, she says. Her high school still had separate proms for black and white students in 1994, her senior year.
"Some of the same things exist in the rural area as in the inner city," she says. "They have the same issues; they just look a little different."
As a child, Joe Ella feared the inner city because of news reports she had heard. But when she read Beverly Tatum's Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, it helped her understand her feelings, she says.
"I've internalized the oppression of my own people," she says. "Embracing the inner city is part of me embracing what it means to be black."
A guest speaker helped interns see how they could embrace the kids in Robles Park, Joe Ella says. The speaker noticed that the interns tried to stop kids from beating on tables during the singing of Jesus Loves Me.
The speaker said the kids were simply trying to add a beat to the song. He compared the interns' reaction to white people coming into black neighborhoods and "paternalizing" them.
"They come in and decide what's best," Joe Ella says. "They look at everything as problems and try to fix "problems' instead of seeing the resources that exist. There's a difference between disempowering and empowering."
So, the interns restructured Art Camp based on what the kids wanted to do.
At home
Mattie Croom, 21, and Lori Fey, 20, have been best friends since high school. They're both from Radcliff, Ky., and both attend the University of Kentucky. Mattie is black. Lori is white. They became close friends when Lori invited Mattie to her church about four years ago.
They came to Tampa not knowing what to expect. They certainly didn't know how much it would strengthen their friendship.
"Now we go into things that are deeper, race wise," Mattie says. "We actually talk about it."
Throughout their friendship, Mattie and Lori never really discussed their racial differences. It was natural for Mattie to tuck away issues that she faces as a black person, even with Lori, because she had been concealing them for so long, she says.
In Ybor Heights, Mattie and Lori could no longer ignore their cultural differences. They live in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house with six other women, two are Asian and four are white. Cultural diversity is all around them.
Even if they tried to ignore the racial differences in their house, race came to the forefront of conversation in an Urban Theology class that is part of the internship. There they read and discussed books about racial issues, such as Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, by Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith.
At night in their room, Mattie "wanted to talk every time we were lying in our beds," Lori says. "She told me some things I've done that affected her. I felt sad because I didn't realize it, and I didn't want to hurt my friend."
The friends declined to go into details about challenging situations. They only say that now they're closer. Mattie adds that she knows herself better.
"This project has really gotten me in touch with being a black woman and what that means," she says. "I'm realizing all the struggles we have and being able to justify what it means to be black."
In the community
Helen Charlene Henderson walks into the house where eight interns live. She's just there to visit.
Though Henderson lives a few blocks away, she stops by regularly to hang out.
Kristen Lasher, 23, is the only intern at home and she's watching three kids from the community, but she doesn't blink before inviting Henderson in.
"How many people let you come up in their house and you actually feel comfortable the first time they meet you?" Henderson says.
Henderson, 43, has one adult son and four grandkids. Currently, she's unemployed but looking for a job as a waitress. She keeps coming back to the interns' house because they keep showing her love, she says.
Today, she's helping Kristen prepare spaghetti for dinner. "Honey, I love to cook," she says, bending back to add emphasis. As Henderson helps dice tomatoes, there's no doubt that she fits in.
People like Henderson are always dropping by the four houses the interns live in. They let their children play at the houses and enjoy a meal every now and then. They also invite the interns to dinner.
It wasn't always like this. People wondered who the interns were and why they'd moved in. As the group of 43 interns walked to church, some neighbors came out to their porches to see what was going on.
"They used to stand out and count how many white people there are," Christine Otero says.
It's now apparent that some community members feel the interns' love.
"I survived the hospital, thanks for your prayers," yells a middle-age lady packing groceries into her car at a Kash n' Karry near Robles Park. She delivers this message as the interns walk by on their way from Art Camp to the bus stop.
During Art Camp, groups of three interns are sent into Robles Park on prayer walks. For 30 minutes, they walk around the neighborhood talking to residents and praying with and for them. They find a place to stop and pray in the open where people can see.
Francis House
Cory Currence, 20, seems to be the "big man on campus" at the Francis House. Like safety pins to a magnet, the kids in the center's children's program gravitate to Cory, a junior education major at the University of Nevada in Reno.
"I can stand on my head," an 11-year-old Hispanic girl says to him. This Tuesday afternoon, she's one of 15 kids at the Francis House, a nonprofit, interfaith center for kids and adults who are either infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, or have close relatives with the virus. Because Francis House services are confidential, the kids will remain unnamed.
"Let's see," Cory answers. "I'll time you."
Cory tosses the girl a couch pillow. She places her head on the pillow and her hands on the floor. Her knees bend in toward her torso, she lifts them up and slowly straightens her legs.
There you have it, a headstand. She stays there 25 seconds.
But the young girl isn't the only one seeing things upside down. Since Cory, who is white, has been volunteering at the Francis House with mostly black and Hispanic children and living in an all-black inner city community, his thoughts on poverty have begun to reverse.
"I always thought poverty was your choice. You need to work harder," Cory says. His dad's hard work helped his parents move out of trailer parks, he says. It helped his father become a commercial pilot. If his parents could work hard and move up, Cory didn't understand why other people couldn't.
Cory grew up in Gardenville, Nev., a small town where he says "old white retired people go." There are some Latinos and even fewer African-Americans, he says. He had heard that white America has a history of oppressing blacks. He didn't believe that it still existed. He used to think to himself, "I'd hire a black person," he says.
"It's definitely a white privilege thing," Cory says. "It's not that people don't know it; they don't want to believe it. That's what's keeping others oppressed."
Cory and other interns want the kids to see the opportunities before them instead of focusing on the virus affecting their lives.
"AIDS doesn't get talked about because some of the kids don't know. We're just here to love them and play with them," says intern Lori Fey, 20, an early childhood education major at the University of Kentucky.
Cory gains the kids' affection by doing what they like to do. When the 11-year-old girl comes down from her headstand, it's Cory's turn.
"Can you do it?" she challenges Cory.
He hesitates. "I haven't done a headstand in a long time," he warns. Then, he goes for it.
Cory stands on his head for 30 seconds.
To learn more
InterVarsity Christian Fellowship is an international campus ministry that sponsors the Tampa Urban Project, the missionary program the interns participated in. It sponsors more than 25 similar missions for college students across the country.
