Portfolio at NYU

Posted 02.05.04
Bed-Sty Youth Buck the Odds

By Jason Boog

David Valcin waved his skinny arms and his gold necklace banged against his baggy t-shirt- he was pretending to be God. "Yo, I picked you outta mad heads. Don't be frontin'. When I say jump, you say how high. When I say bark, you best 'a bark. Don't be a' scared, 'cause I got your back," he said.
The rest of the Saint John the Baptist Catholic youth group cheered him on, laughing so hard that the rickety couch beneath them almost fell over. They had written the script together, paraphrasing the story of the Jewish prophet, Jeremiah. Yanking the story out of its stuffy King James' cadences, they scribbled a new version on construction paper-complete with Bed-Sty hip-hop vocabulary.
After the giggling died down, the parish youth director stood up. Dressed in a loose purple sweatshirt and a sliver-sized crucifix, Jeannie Ortiz quietly blends in with her kids. "Sometimes when we talk to people about the Bible, its better to put it in our own words," she explains. "It's hard to evangelize out here, to get people to put down their PlayStations and listen to you."
The son of Haitian-immigrants, David joined the Bedford-Stuyvesant youth group two years ago. He attended St. John's Catholic School for his whole life, but had to transfer to Erasmus Public for high school. The switch to a Flatbush high school with three different campuses housed inside one building and thousands of new students was overwhelming. But Ortiz's "evangelization" caught him at this crucial point, and now David comes back each Monday to study religion with the 10-person youth group.
Teenagers make up a large chunk of Bed-Sty's population. By the 2000 Census, youth below 19-years-old make up nearly 35% of the neighborhood. Historically, hundreds of inner-city students struggle to graduate here, much less study religion in their free time.
The school district contains 86% African Americans and 11% Hispanics-a concentration of the minorities with highest drop-out rates in the city. According to a Manhattan Institute study from 2000, these groups are 27% less likely to graduate than whites are in the same school system.
St. John's youth group members range between 14 and 18-years-old, stuck in the middle of a drop-out crisis. They can relate to Jeremiah's struggles, trying to do the right thing in a tough environment-whether the inner city or a Biblical village.

The 15-minute walk between the subway and St. John the Baptist passes signs of old-style affluence and contemporary poverty. The avenue passes century-old brownstones with chipping iron stairwells, some of the first homes owned by African Americans in the United States. A few blocks up, chain-link fence with razor-wire tops guards an empty lot, reflecting the poverty that tarnished those proud buildings over the last 50 years.
The honeycomb-shaped Roosevelt Public Housing Complex towers beside the old Catholic Church. Just like mounting poverty reduced many magnificent brownstones, St. John's grand building has dwindled over the last century.
In 1981, mounting heating and restoration bills forced the parish to close off half of their gigantic brick church. Fresh-painted plaster walls carved a new altar-shape, even though the old brick peeks out at the joints. Now a smaller congregation fills the 300 seats.
The youth group meets in the original Catholic schoolhouse, a maze of stairs and long rooms from another era. Each visitor passes through three buzzer doors to get upstairs, and each floor contains a bank of security televisions.
The parish renovated a lofty-ceiling schoolroom into a youth lounge, sprucing up the drafty space with secondhand furniture and motivational posters. Kids from all over the Bed-Sty neighborhood have formed a small contingent here. Each week they perform religious skits, study the Bible, and plan good-will projects for the locals-keeping with the parish mission.
"We want to follow our parishioners from the womb to the tomb," said Ortiz. The church runs a long list of social services for the poor congregation, despite a limited budget. In addition to spirituality, they offer community ESL courses, GED tutors, family counseling, and transportation.
Like the Bed-Sty community, the parish contains a large immigrant population. Spanish speakers compose 80% of the Catholic community. Every Sunday immigrants from Mexico, Columbia, the Dominican Republic, and Ecuador gather for a Spanish Mass.
As a Puerto Rican immigrant, Ortiz feels comfortable with these new arrivals. She's worked as a youth minister for 18 years, beginning as a teenager in a Bushwick youth group. During the day, she teaches religion at the Catholic grade school across the street. On youth group nights, she shuttles the youth group members home in a church van.
"These are my children," she said.

After the Bible skit, the kids discussed the logistics of an upcoming religious retreat. They will stay in the youth lounge for three days this March, listening to spiritual lectures from visiting priests, praying, and playing sleep-over games with their friends.
"They always get excited This is a problem neighborhood, and I think they're glad for the chance to get out of it for awhile," Ortiz explained.
The retreat is a three-year old parish tradition. Each member will bring blankets, towels, soap and teddy-bears for an inexpensive summer camp experience within the church compound.
"There's no cell phones, no radios or videogames allowed," explained Karen Padua, a long-time member. "We get to lots of time to pray and think. Then we laugh and cry together."
After the skits and the retreat discussion, Ortiz let the conversation drift lazily across teenaged life. Members debated about music, compared mid-term grades from school and complained about teachers. They munched on candy-bars and popcorn left over from another church meeting, leaving religion behind for awhile.
Karen and David bickered playfully, grabbing the spotlight as the oldest youth group members. "All you Hispanic girls got attitudes," he said, stomping his foot for some Latin flair.
"I went to New Jersey once. You don't realize how you talk until everybody talks different," added Karen.
While the youth group kids stay mostly well-behaved in the calm bubble of the youth lounge, Ortiz cut them off when they started to mock other teachers. "I don't know why you fool like that in school. Some of you need to stop playing around. I expect more from you guys."
The kids dutifully stopped playing, settling back with a Bible worksheet. After Ortiz's lecture, they hunched like medieval scholars over onion-skin Bible pages.

Bed-Sty's future hinges on how this teenaged-demographic turns out. There are many ways to register the success of youth organizations in Bed-Sty. For instance, all crime statistics have diminished at least 30% in the community over the last ten years. NYPD youth programs and city reform helped make the Bed-Sty neighborhood safer.
However, according to a 2000 Pratt Institute study, poverty rates rose 2.7% since 1990 -- 35% of Bed-Sty residents now live below the poverty line. While kids might be avoiding crime, the cycle of poverty still holds them back. Coupled with high drop-out rates, these figures shut out too many teenagers from higher education and better opportunities.
Within the St. John's youth group, at least, these statistics don't matter. These ten kids found a safe outpost against some daunting odds. Every youth group member told me they wanted to go to college, and according to Ortiz, the majority of them will.
St. John's has a "monitoring alliance" with St. John's University in Queens, helping low-income families from the parish attend the university. Vickie Herrera graduated from the youth group last year, and now she attends St. John's University on that scholarship.
When asked about how the youth group affected her life, Herrera showed off a painting that her group had designed for future members.
A lighthouse stands in one corner, bathed in long beams of white light-a pair of ghostly heavenly arms stretching out over a long beach. Below, Hispanic and African-American teenagers frolic around the water, glowing with that same light. An angry-looking Latino boy stands underneath a giant wave, and a young girl struggles to pull him out.
Herrera pointed to the boy almost swamped by the wave, and explained: "The farther away you are from the light, the easier it is for bad things to happen to you."
It's hard to imagine that a little group with such high expectations could change a troubled neighborhood, but they've managed to hold each other together. After all, these kids grew up on stories where impossible things happen every day.

At the end of David's skit, God sends his prophet back out into a world that won't listen to his message of reform.
David read his lines with all the fury of a pint-sized Southern preacher: "Today I put you in charge of the projects and dumpsters here in Bed-Sty, to pimp-slap some sense into the wannabe gangstas and destroy all haters and build a new and slammin' ghetto world."