Neighborhoods: East Garfield Park

Although Chicago is a huge city, it's split into lots of neighborhoods. Chicago is made up of 77 concrete community areas which are used to map community development, but has somewhere between 77 and 215 neighborhoods, depending on who you ask. These neighborhoods are also constantly shifting, in size, name, and population. Usually a Chicago resident will know which neighborhood they live in, and derive some part of their own identity from their neighborhood. The closest I can compare it to for Lincoln residents is like asking where somebody went to high school - the name means a lot more than just a building.

I've lived in Chicago for essentially four years now, but still feel more like a resident of Hyde Park (where the University of Chicago is) than Chicago itself. Living in a completely different neighborhood now certainly is helping to change things, but I'd like to travel more. To that end, I'm going to try and visit every neighborhood in Chicago.

Q: But Katie, you explain, Chicago neighborhoods change all the time. So how will you find an actual list?
A: Tourism! I'm using the neighborhoods map at Chicago's official tourism site, http://www.explorechicago.org/city/en/neighborhoods.html. This is just a bit more extensive than the 77 official community areas, and tends to include tiny-but-popular neighborhoods like Boystown and Wrigleyville. Unfortunately, I will be a tourist in these neighborhoods, so the perspectives offered here are going to be pretty incomplete and possibly sometimes incorrect - people in Chicago reading this, feel free to add things!

Thus far I have been to many neighborhoods (at least a third!), but have only consciously visited a few. First off, though, I suppose I should start with East Garfield Park where I live. (Some maps list this area as Fifth City, but nobody who lives here has yet identified as a Fifth City resident. I asked Krista about it, and she assured me that the two designations have melded together.)

East Garfield Park is, confusingly, in the west side of Chicago. It is, logically, east of Garfield Park, which is absolutely gigantic and has a beautiful conservatory. East Garfield Park has had a lot of shifting demographics in the past 60 years - it's gone from mostly German to Italian to Jewish to Southern White to finally African American all within one lifetime. This is where the original Sears Tower was - which is still here, but is only a few stories tall. Sears and Roebuck had their first magazine factory/shipping center here, and was a major employer before they moved. The neighborhood has changed a lot since then, especially because of the race riots in the '60s. Right now the neighborhood is around 97% African American, which makes myself and my roommates stand out. Since everybody in the house travels a lot, people in the immediate area seem to be pretty used to us, and consider us "people with the church".

The church in question is First Church of the Brethren, who owns Faith House and is graciously hosting us this year. I spent a summer hosting mission trips in that church, so being inside there stirs memories of hymn sings and very early mornings. The church's windows are my favorite sight in Garfield Park, although the Conservatory's greenhouses are technically more beautiful. The church has a relatively small membership now, but has been a staple of the community through huge memberships and tiny ones. The window has a tiny Dr. Martin Luther King Jr at the bottom corner in recognition of his work in the neighborhood -- when he was working for equality in Chicago, he had an office in the church building.

Second Week of Work

So, here's the end of my second week of work! Things are starting to make sense at both Fourth Church and Sarah's Inn -- I have my own computers with working server access, phones in case people want to call me, and all those trappings of employment. That said, I'm still new enough that when somebody did try to call me at Sarah's Inn, I had no idea how to pick up on my extension and somebody had to run in and show me which buttons to push (apparently, landlines with extensions are beyond my current understanding. Who knows what'll happen when I have to transfer a call).
I am getting better at using the phone at Sarah's Inn, since I've been calling our current volunteers to introduce myself. My boss Colleen has been trying to give me some background on who all these people are, what they like to do, etc, but speaking with them has really helped me attach files to people with personalities. I started keeping little notes about each call so I could remember people better, and then realized that every one involved a note like, "Awesome", "Friendly", or "Really nice!". It makes sense that people who work on a crisis line would be generally wonderful and especially welcoming on the phone. I'm looking forward to actually meeting more of them in person at the Sarah's Inn Reunion (30 years of open doors!) coming up this week.
Today was my second day teaching the 6th and 7th grade class at Fourth Church. This week was definitely less intimidating than the first session, especially since I'm starting to learn kids' names. The kids shared their favorite Bible stories, and many of them chose ones I wouldn't have expected. Some of the most surprising were the stories of Abraham going to sacrificed Isaac, and the Parable of the Talents. A girl explained to me that she chose a parable as her favorite story because she didn't understand it yet, and was curious about it. It's really challenging to get all of the kids to focus, or even to stop yelling, but in small groups they tend to pay attention more, which is fantastic.
This week we ordered a basket of produce from a group called Growing Power (http://growingpower.org/chicago_projects.htm). Growing Power has a few farms which grow food, including one owned by Fourth Church. The organization sells bags of produce in areas where people don't necessarily have access to fresh fruits and vegetables, which includes the neighborhood we live in. The basket included basics like potatoes and corn, but also things like tiny hot peppers, kale, and one lone okra. It's fun to have a variety of things, even things which we're not sure how to cook.
Here's a picture of the mural on the side of our house. It was painted last summer while I was living in Faith House, so it's great to see the finished product. The people on the mural are members of the First Church of the Brethren, who owns the building.

Various Things That Have Happened

A lot of little interesting things have happened, so here are some little updates, trivial things first.
First off, the squirrel is gone. We figured out that it was getting in through the A/C window unit. Steph and I chased it around with a broom for a while (on her birthday!), and then our city director's husband came over and chased the thing long enough that it finally gave up and jumped out a window. It's been half a week since then, and so far the squirrel appears to be entirely gone.
Each week we have decided to give ourselves a new team name. This is because not all of us in the house are Young Adult Volunteers, and many of the YAVs don't feel like Official DOOR people, so we are on the lookout for a more universally accepted name. This week we are Team Awesome.
Tonight we had dinner with the Mennonite Volunteer Service group. They live in community like we do, but have more of a rolling acceptance time and tend to stick around in the same placement for more than a year. They're also the second group which has had us over for community dinner, which means that we need to start having other communities over sometime soon.
Yesterday was my first day teaching the junior high group at Fourth Presbyterian, which is called Elevation. (Quick note for the Nebraskans: Chicago has no real understanding of "middle school". A lot of schools go K-8, and then high schools go 9-12, or occasionally smaller schools just go K-12. So although Fourth Church recognizes 6-8 graders as a separate group, those kids would probably not think of themselves as middle schoolers, and the delineation seems a tad more arbitrary than it would in a district where 6-8 graders go to a separate school.) There were just over 30 middle schoolers, which the assistants assured me was more than usual, but normal for the first Sunday of a new school year. I have two assistants, and they are both great at getting the kids to focus and also at knowing what to expect, since they've been around a few years. Since it was the first week, we focused on doing icebreaker games and brainstorming ideas about what to do in the upcoming year (apparently gardening sounds like fun to them, but sorting donations does not).
After Elevation, we had a Sunday School kick-off lunch and carnival, which included a safer equivalent of a dunk tank where victims had water balloons popped over their heads. When the youth pastor told me to bring clothes to get wet in, I assumed that this would be a fleeting wetness, like being squirted with a water gun. Not so much. I had at least a dozen gigantic water balloons popped over me, which completely soaked every part of my clothes. The experience left me really, really clean, sopping wet, and also endeared me to the kindergarteners who were playing the game. After the first balloon popped over me, John (the youth pastor) told me, "Welcome to Fourth Church!" with a huge grin on his face which was probably derived from the fact that he had finally escaped the water balloons. After that somewhat chilly baptism, I do feel more like somebody who belongs there, not some kid who just keeps showing up during the workweek. I'll see if I can get a picture of it to post - I know some were taken, and I'm pretty sure they look ridiculous.
I also met some of the volunteers at Sarah's Inn this weekend, in my first volunteer meeting. It was great to get to put names and faces together, since my boss has been trying to bring me up to speed by explaining the strengths of each volunteer in our directory. Eventually, I might even be able to remember them all.

First Day at Fourth Church

Today was my first day at Fourth Presbyterian Church (http://www.fourthchurch.org). The church is absolutely huge, and smack dab in the middle of one of the snazziest shopping areas in Chicago on Michigan Avenue. When the church was founded, it was on a dirt road, which explains a lot about just how long Fourth Church has been around. It was also designed by Ralph Adams Cram, who is the same architect who designed my home church. Wandering around the church was somewhat terrifying, since I know it'll take a long time for me to figure out where things are. The church does look similar to First Presbyterian, which was intensely comforting. Fourth Church is getting a new addition to the building, which means that finding a place to house me has been difficult (apparently tomorrow I will have both a desk and a computer of my very own).
At Fourth Church I'll be working with the 6th and 7th grade youth, teaching the New Testament and planning monthly service and fellowship activities. The person who had the job before me was kind enough to leave extremely detailed curriculum notes, which makes lesson planning relatively simple. There's also a lock-in coming up soon: I have been assured that mid-high students sleep at lock-ins, but am not sure whether or not to believe it.
Most of my workday was spent looking through past curriculum and tween ministry books, and talking to my boss, John. I made four pages worth of lists today; games to play in an open area, games to play with paper, educational games, places to volunteer, activities for inside the church, and of course things to ask John about. The sheer size of Fourth Church (and the novelty of teaching middle schoolers) is intimidating, but the people I've gotten to meet so far are extremely welcoming.

First Day at Sarah's Inn

So today we all started at our placements. This was my first day at Sarah's Inn, which is an agency that helps survivors of domestic abuse (check out http://sarahsinn.org/). I'm the Volunteer Coordinator, which is a new position that has been carved out as an internship. I met my boss, Colleen, before now, and we spent most of the day talking about how Sarah's Inn works and what the volunteers are like. This month I can make myself useful with clerical duties, but I won't really be an effective YAV until I complete the 40 hour training which all volunteers go through. That training is in October, so right now I'll be spending a lot of my time getting to know the volunteers and other staff members.
This first day I didn't have many things to actually do, since I still have a lot of things to learn (like, where staplers are kept and how to sign onto our server). So most of what I learned is that the people at Sarah's Inn are overwhelmingly friendly, and that being accepted as an adult is extremely exciting. This is the first time I haven't been a student worker, the first time I've had my own office, the first time I get to choose when I come into work and don't have to write down my hours. It feels absolutely fantastic.

On a more humorous note, there is a squirrel somewhere in our apartment. Potts is the only person who's seen it, but he assures us that it exists. It is probably also a tad dazed, because he watched it run into a shut window. Sadly, the squirrel could not be convinced to leave through an open window, and we have no idea where it is.

Hospitality Day

This is us! From left to right, we are Tad, Potts, Brian, Me (Katie), Mara, and Stephanie.


Every Monday my housemates and I have the day off from our work placements and spend time with Krista, studying Chicago, traveling, or doing devotional reflections. For our first Monday together, Krista declared Labor Day to be Hospitality Day. We had to be hospitable to people throughout Chicago, however we saw fit. As a group, we were somewhat stumped. Everyone can recognize hospitality when it's offered to them, but figuring out a way to share with others is a tad more difficult. After discussing the matter, we decided to bake cookies and brownies, make lemonade, and set out a stand near Faith House, offering treats and games of checkers to whoever walked by. The plan sounded good, but it turns out that there's very little foot traffic near Faith House on a holiday. We split up into pairs, bagged up some cookies, and went into different parts of the city to hand out treats.
My roommate Tad and I headed toward University of Illinois-Chicago, assuming that college students would always want free cookies. Although there weren't as many people around as we assumed, people on the trains and at bus stops accepted the brownies and cookies from us. Tad and I are a pair of introverts, so it was strange for us to approach strangers and offer them food. By the time we started out of cookies, we were becoming more comfortable chatting to people on the street. It was a good end to our orientation to Chicago, especially since we've been depending on directions from strangers for most of the week.
Tomorrow I start work at Sarah's Inn, and the day after I begin work at Fourth Presbyterian Church. I'm hoping things go well.
Here's a picture of Faith House, where we live. There will be more pictures to come, but uploading them takes some time.

Hello and Basics

Here's my new blog devoted to my year as a Young Adult Volunteer in Chicago. It's unlikely that anybody reading this blog doesn't know about what a YAV is, but here are the basics.
Young Adult Volunteers is a program run by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A). In it, people devote themselves to a year of service somewhere in the world (there are 16 sites this year, from Tucson to Kenya). When possible, each group of YAVs in a city also lives together in intentional Christian community, splitting chores and providing a support network for each other. My program in Chicago is also a part of DOOR, which stands for Discovering Opportunities for Outreach and Reflection. DOOR is a half PCUSA, half Mennonite organization that aims to teach people to "see the face of God in the city". They host anything from week-long mission trips to year-long service volunteers, like us.
This is the first year that Chicago has been a YAV or year-long DOOR site, and there are six of us living in Faith House. Faith House used to be a two-flat apartment building, which makes it pretty spacious for six people. Our site director, Krista, also lives around the corner from us, so we can hassle her if we have any pressing 3 A.M. questions.
The past two weeks have been orientation, both for general YAVs and Chicago DOOR people. The first week, spent in Stony Point, NY at a PCUSA retreat center, was focused on more general information and social theory. We had some time to hike and relax with our fellow YAVs, but spent most of the time in discussions about privilege, globalization, culture shock, and other topics which have affected us for years, but we are rarely conscious of. This week's Chicago orientation was more focused on logistics -- how to get around on Chicago's public transportation system, organizing our grocery budget, the things we needed to function in the city. One day a week will be spent learning about social injustice in Chicago, so we have quite a bit more time to explore it. We've also toured at each of our individual placement sites, so we understand what our roommates are doing during the work-week. It's been a lot of fun, but right now I'm really excited to finally start work next week.