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The Neighborhood
Tiptoeing into Poverty and Finding Hope
By Leslie Alig Collins
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2010 Leslie Alig Collins
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4520-6719-3
Chapter One
Meet Neighborhood Academy
As I step into the century-old church building, grit crunches under my Birkenstocks. I should have worn socks. I look down at the floor and feel sadness at the oldness of the cracked, black and gray diamond shapes that used to be decent linoleum. In their day, they were probably black and white. I trudge up the staircase holding the sticky wood banister while making a mental note to stop at the drug store for some hand sanitizer on the way home. The pharmacist will know the strongest brand. I tell myself that the railing was probably once polished to a high sheen. The first thing I remember thinking when I step into the lone classroom at Neighborhood Academy is: "Boy, they're going to need some bigger desks in here. Could somebody please give these people a leg up?"
* * *
Jim Streitelmeier, a pastor on the younger end of middle age, sits folded into a child-size chair. He and a teenager are hashing out the answer to a math story problem, seated at a table more suited to second-grader. Never mind. It's learning that's important in this Neighborhood Academy classroom.
Neighborhood. Sounds like a sunny cul-de-sac where happy kids play ball and ride bikes.
Academy. The word seems fitting for a private school in the suburbs where it's not uncommon for homes to have entire nightclubs in their basements and vast upper-floor suites for the seclusion and comfort of harried parents.
Neighborhood Academy is none of the above. It's smack dab in the middle of an area riddled with every known form of twenty-first-century urban pestilence.
When I started visiting Neighborhood Academy regularly in 2004, the entire school was one room on the second floor of a century-old church building that bore the scars of neglect. To get to the school room, I made my way down a cavernous hallway and past rooms scattered randomly with institutional tables, metal folding chairs and unmatched shelving. Here and there were sagging couches people had donated with the good intention of upgrading the church and school.
The academy status of this place comes from the heart of the school, not from a measure of its furnishings. Its students are salted away from the destruction and failure of inner-city public schools—not by distance, but by philosophy.
Going there wasn't easy in the beginning. I live a relatively comfortable life in the suburbs. People like me go to college, take our kids to Little League and soccer and are room mothers at school. We don't generally gravitate toward problematic situations if we don't have to. And so, making trips to the forlorn precinct of Neighborhood Fellowship Church and its tiny academy started out as a dismal task, especially on rainy days. I'm usually sad to begin with on rainy days. Driving south of the polite areas of town, I'd go from sad to depressed. Feeling shallow, I confessed this one day to Jim, who laughed out loud and said, "I don't blame you. I get depressed about it all the time. But Jesus Himself was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief."
The trips downtown were to become the highlight of my week, and its children a source of great joy and marvelous revelation. I just didn't know it yet.
On the face of it, the neighborhood just east of Tenth and Rural streets on Indianapolis' near east side is a place where gloom is etched on the faces of unkempt men who wear linty woolen caps even in the summertime and who roam the streets aimlessly as though they've stayed too long—like grimy roadside snow that has long since worn out its welcome. The inhabitants of the place have largely become as run down as the buildings whose heyday splendor came and went in the first half of the twentieth century.
For the children who live in this landscape, Neighborhood Academy is a gift. There is no tuition and no exam to exclude anyone. For most, it provides eight hours a day of relief from relentless trouble. After all, how much trouble can a story problem be to a kid whose parents are likely at home smoking crack?
Neighborhood Academy operates from the premise that there is promise in every household, street and block.
Jim and Debbie Strietelmeier and their three children could have stayed in the suburbs back in the mid-1990s, when Jim worked at a gas station in the upper-crust suburb of Zionsville, Indiana, cheerfully pumping gas and otherwise serving the people he knew from his church. The same people would later serve with him in the inner city—sometimes humbly and sometimes not.
While he held the gas station job, Jim was an intern for Zionsville Fellowship, a church with roots in the 1970s bolt from conventional religiosity to the simplicity of the early church. Those involved in this movement called it a revival or a renewal. His internship, combined with their childhood experience, graduation from Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, and missionary service in Africa, were the training grounds that prepared the Strietelmeiers to work in the trenches of trouble. They long to return to Africa, but their dark continent, for now, is urban Indianapolis.
The Bible was the source of their decision to take their children and move south to the city. They take seriously the passages that predict suffering for committed Christians. Jim points to one verse in particular: "For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for him ..." (Philippians 1:29)
The Strietelmeiers couldn't just talk about suffering for the cause of Christ. Talk's cheap. They chose to live out the words. For them, that meant not waiting around for distress to come their way, but to seek it out. To choose suffering. Their deliberate walk into the storm landed them on east Tenth Street, where nothing much grows in the dirt that surrounds buildings and weedy parking lots. In their new neighborhood, they found one out of every five existing homes vacant, boarded up, or in major disrepair.
From this rude setting sprang Neighborhood Academy. Now, more than a decade later, love blooms there, packaged in an old building's worn walls. The Strietelmeiers and the band of fellow laborers have nurtured and grown a hub of kindness, warmth, and spiritual guidance in the midst of desolation.
Over the years, it became easier to go there, even on those down-in-the-dumps rainy days. I no longer trudge down there, feeling like an impostor because I drummed up a cheerful face while feeling a certain sadness over the sheer weight of poverty and trouble. After all, bottomless pits of trouble take getting used to. As time passed, I never failed to find God's mercy inside those doors. I would put on the face, do the work, and leave blessed. I found undeserved mercy, every time. Joy found me in the midst of relentless suffering.
* * *
The story problem Jim and the girl named Kim—a round-faced girl with brownish-blonde hair slicked back into a ponytail—were working on that day was about determining the interest rate on cash—foreign territory for the mystified teen, who sat there looking bored. Chances are it will remain foreign, even as she grows up. But Jim likes taking chances.
And so, Jim explains the story problem to Kim: "You're going to find that you have to multiply the days. There are 365 days in a year. This is what bankers do."
A light bulb switches on in her head, and Kim brightens at this explanation, going on in earnest to figure out the answer.
She does not know if she'll graduate from high school this year, but she's philosophical. A handwritten sign on crookedly torn paper hanging over her school desk reads, "You may be disappointed if you fail, but you're doomed if you don't try."
Little do the teacher and the student know that in a few short weeks Kim's father will be dead of a drug overdose and that Jim will be presiding over the funeral. Kim will be dealing with a lesson too horrific and too big for her seventeen years—a tutorial of suffering that will impact her life more deeply than a lesson on investments.
Jim is not trying to help her escape the neighborhood. He is trying to help her cope with what is, trying to get her to see there's a world beyond crumbling sidewalks, barred store windows, and empty-eyed prostitutes who hawk their bodies across the street from the school.
Prostitution is not always across the street. I remember the day I went looking for Jim outside, thinking I might find him in the church van, parked out front. As I walked toward the van, I saw a woman pulling up her jeans as a man sat watching on a wall shoring up a garden of weeds.
Now, by this time I should have been seasoned to this sort of thing, having watched Jim on numerous occasions shoo prostitutes and Johns from the building. But hearts pound when evil looms, and my heart was thundering.
Should I turn and walk away? Should I cross the street? Who knew what kind of lunacy lurked over there? Why, oh why, did I ever leave the safety of the church?
I decided that shock and horror weren't the way to go, so I just went about my business and acted nonchalant. I averted my eyes, wishing I was anywhere but there.
Down the street, Jim was not in the van. I had to walk back past the offending people—alone. I felt anything but nonchalant or polite. I felt the awful loneliness of being in the wrong place.
The woman was still yanking at her skin-tight jeans. I remembered some advice Jim had given me about the dangers of exhibiting suburban politeness on the street: "That kind of politeness gets no respect."
Not that I wanted to be respected by these two. I just didn't want to be a victim, and I for sure didn't want to seem as though all of this was okay with me. Fighting the urge to mold my face into a polite, inane smile, I looked straight ahead, blankly. As I walked by, the man snickered and said, "Everything's okay here."
"I'm not so sure about that," I blurted, out of nowhere and kept on walking. I was glad I had said it.
I thought of the children inside the building, and part of me wanted to turn and strangle these people who would add their sordid corruption to the troubles already wrought upon the children's lives. Forgive me, Lord, for breaking the commandment about murder.
Later, Jim scolded me for walking alone on the sidewalk, saying that I should have immediately gone into the building to find him. I reminded Jim he wasn't in the building, which was why I was out on the street in the first place. He laughed and asked if I had taken notes. Jim always wanted to know if I was taking notes for "The Book."
But hey, spring is here, so who can help being outside? I ask Jim if he is relieved to have some time off—spring break, you know. He just laughs out loud. "The insanity doesn't end at spring break. It just moves over here to our house and takes up residence."
* * *
Jim Strietelmeier tutors the kids but also acts as janitor, bus driver and security guard. He was instrumental in the founding of Neighborhood Academy, along with a host of quiet Barnabas-types who have faithfully backed the effort since 1996 after Debbie's mother, Linda Jackson, and friend Joy Elliott came up with the idea for the school.
Debbie's father, Phil Jackson, now a widower, is the senior pastor at the church and stoic school watchman. During one of my visits in 2006, I find Phil sitting patiently in the classroom watching for opportunities to be useful as person-in-charge Jessie Glaser plods through a mountain of paperwork at a huge, old wooden office desk. Phil offers grandfatherly help to kids struggling with their lessons. To maintain order, he has only to quietly speak the name of the one who's shooting a rubber band or jostling other students.
As Phil monitors the dozen or so kids, he glances wistfully out the new windows installed that week, donated by a local window company. The sashes and panes gleam against the old, dark building. The early spring sun blazes into the classroom that day without the filter of ancient dust and grime that had, for decades, cast a dank pall over the rooms of the church building. Keeping order is easier in a decent atmosphere.
In the upstairs hallway leading to Neighborhood Academy, a faded plastic flower bouquet blooms in a defunct porcelain drinking fountain attached to the wall. Big, bright rooms that have seen the hand of help radiate from the darkened corridor where stacks of long tables and lengths of wood stand waiting for a purpose. The clutter hides some of the peeling plaster walls. Someone years ago threw down a long carpet remnant but seemingly never bothered with it again. It covers the aged brown linoleum that is splitting in chunks from the wooden floor beneath. It's no use sweeping up every day. Sweeping is the least of their worries down here.
In stark contrast, new ductwork gleams overhead, snaking along into the bright classroom like an arrow pointing to a place of hope: "Follow me. Here's a happy place."
Chapter Two
Suffering on Purpose
With a perpetually optimistic focus centered on his destiny of serving the poor, Jim Strietelmeier usually looks as though he got dressed in a hurry. It's not that he's a slob, but he has neither the time nor desire to preen in front of a mirror. His life teems with pressing issues, and one of them isn't his shirt—or his beard, which is sometimes trimmed, sometimes not. Periodically, he's on a diet. All of the time, he's available—except electronically.
"Don't bother sending me e-mails because I probably won't read them," he cheerfully advised everyone shortly after someone invented e-mail. The advice remains today. E-mails are too much trouble, but going down to the county jail with a crying neighbor who knocks at his door at midnight to say her husband had been arrested is not.
He is widely known for losing his cell phone and probably won't remember that you had penned in an appointment with him at a certain hour. Bother him anytime in person, though, and he'll greet you with a smile and sit down for a long talk. You'll never know you just interrupted him. He's about the business of just being there.
Debbie is about caretaking—for her own four children and two adopted ones; for the school, and seeing to it that lunch is ready, and for presiding over giant meal tables in their home. She is organized and usually knows where the cell phone is. She keeps her long, brown hair neatly pulled back into a ponytail.
The Strietelmeiers have felt the sting of learning that, to some observers, their work is morose entertainment, considering the relentless hardship of the people who live along East Tenth Street. They've been prodded and examined by reporters, the intrusions into their lives sometimes resulting in articles that brought dismay to the faces of Neighborhood Fellowship people who never before saw themselves as misfits. Their world, after all, had always seemed predictably ordinary to them. Nobody down here spends their money at Abercrombie & Fitch or Crate & Barrel. Everybody is used to hearing gunshots and witnessing mayhem. They just duck and dodge and go on about their business, watching their back. Most people's homesteads are in sorry need of paint and topsoil. So what?
When they have a few bucks for gas, people down here might mow the patches of crabgrass and chickweed they call a lawn—and that's only if they managed to get their hands on some sputtering piece of machinery that was once a real lawn mower. Otherwise, they consider the weeds part of the landscaping.
After the news reporters come and go, the Strietlemeiers and the people they shepherd often read printed versions of themselves that are unfamiliar, depending on the writer. The curious but unconcerned writers simply use the people's distress to hook and entertain readers. This type of mainstream journalist doesn't go on to tell about the value of suffering that Jim and Debbie painstakingly outline in every interview. Their declarations of joy in the midst of sorrow are generally dismissed as mere sidelines—if included at all.
What do they mean by "the value of suffering"? In the eyes of the world at large, there is no value in having no transportation to work. The world sees no glory in dealing daily with drugs and crime—or in being robbed several times a year, or in fearing for your life because you unwittingly violated some vague, hallowed gang rule.
"We have a theology of suffering," Jim explained to me one day in the hallway outside the academy classroom. "We don't look around for how we can suffer more. We could put our hand in the fire and do that. We just use the suffering we already have. God teaches, and we are the illustration. The godly result is the value of it."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Neighborhood by Leslie Alig Collins Copyright © 2010 by Leslie Alig Collins. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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