Imaginary Boundaries
A life-changing discovery during an inner-city internship.
By Kendra Hand
Leaving one’s comfort zone behind can be a terrifying, surreal experience. That’s what I found out last summer during an internship that took me from the grassy suburbs of Atlanta into the heart of the inner city. I was surrounded by people who looked like me, people I connected with, yet I felt culturally alienated, a long way from my comfort zone.
Working with the Atlanta Inner-City Ministry (AIM), I was responsible for organizing weekly programs and a weeklong overnight camp for children who lived in the local communities around Lakewood Church of Christ. Lakewood is a poverty-stricken area south of downtown Atlanta. I understood that the children would have a different background than my upper-middle-class upbringing, and I braced myself.
Every Tuesday and Wednesday, I traveled with various AIM staffers in a school bus to pick up 50 to 60 children ages 6 to 14. The children would get on the bus tattered, loud, and aggressive. To my outsider eyes, they appeared neglected and negatively influenced. But there was no mistaking the joy that lit up their faces when the bus with “Atlanta Inner-City Ministry” on its side came honking onto their streets. This is when my presumptions began to dissolve, when I began to see the kids on the bus for who they really are: children.
For too long, I had built up an image of inner-city Atlanta as a hopeless vat of failure. When I thought of southeast Atlanta where Lakewood is located, I simply thought “ghetto,” a place to avoid, because it housed dangerous people and toxic minds. But when I saw the children, poor and happy, impoverished and innocent, misunderstood and hopeful, I realized my preconceived notions were just that, notions.
It occurred to me that these children were to a very large extent a product of their environment, just as I am a product of mine. How could I have judged the most pure of God’s creatures when all they were guilty of was learning from their surroundings and acting the only way they knew? Regardless of our socioeconomic standing and of our rearing, we were the same in our primal right.
Throughout the summer, I formed a bond with the children and others in the Lakewood Church area. The more people I spoke to, the more my prejudices disintegrated. No more was there them and me; we were one as a people trying to hold our own in an often unmerciful world. I left my internship with a humbled feeling of belonging, the borders of my comfort zone enormously expanded.
The children’s communities lay in rubble now; they’ve been bulldozed to make way for condos and apartments for the well-to-do. It’s strange that as these inner-city streets have disappeared, so have my misconceptions about the people who lived there. And for that I have the children to thank, wherever they live now.
