James - Epworth - Blog 4

Today at the experience at Epworth felt normal for me.  The day went fast but it almost felt like a job or something that I had been doing for a while.  The outbursts, arguments, and their overall behavior didn’t surprise me anymore.  When I came to this realization early in the day I was a little surprised at how normal things had become so quickly.  I spent most of my day doing on-on-one help with the students in the class.  I had learned the differences in each student and my explanations reflected this.  All of the students were on a different level in one subject or another and it was much easier to teach the students once I figured this out.

After school we went to St. Louis for the first time.  Everyone native to the city told us to visit the Loop.  The Loop was located a few blocks from our evening volunteer location so we finally left the church for the night.  The location was very similar to Mass. Street however it held lots of information about famous residents of St. Louis that kept our attention for a while.  While the trip had been a great time so far it was nice to get out of the normal routine that we had already established.

Following the loop we went to our Thursday night volunteer opportunity at the YES house.  The house is a part of Epworth that lets teens who are homeless have a place to stay.  We played board games with some of the residents who were receptive to the idea.  Everyone seemed to have a good time but some of the conversations I overheard quickly made this the most depressing part of the trip.  There was one resident who refused to take part in any of the activities so I tried to figure out why.  I overheard his friends talking with him and I found out that he wanted to leave the YES house.  The problem was he had nowhere else to go except the streets.  It had been snowing off and on today and was miserably cold.  His friends tried to talk him out of it and tried to remind him of how horrible it had been living on the streets.  He rejected any input from his friends and said that he was leaving tonight.  He was still there when we left and I haven’t stopped thinking about this incident.  Like those at Epworth he is too young to have to be worrying about issues such as this, it’s heartbreaking.