Spring 2015_Adventure Two: What is place, whose place is it, and whose place is it not?

By the time you arrive to this adventure, you will have begun to unpack the importance of place.  In particular, you will have been asked to think about the university, your specific college, and your city, and you will, perhaps more importantly have been asked to think about what defines a community of need and a community of promise.  

The fundamental question is, why is place important?  This exercise will help you further the journey down the road, and it will also help you understand how your place needs YOU, and people like you, to make it better.

Here are the words to Clint Smith's Spoken Word piece titled Place Matters, the one in the video above.  Play it again, but this time scroll down here to read the words.  Then, respond to the prompt below.

As a child, my father would tell me stories of ancient Egyptian warriors

Traveling for endless days and nights across infinite desert plains

Showing signs of endurance and bravery I could only dream of emulating.

He would tell me

That, upon their return home, these warriors would be welcomed with a feast

Worthy of their bravery on the battlefield.

Years later, as a teacher in ? Washington D.C.,

I do now find myself traversing a desert,

Though it is not the one I envisioned.

A food desert

Is categorized as a poor urban area where residents cannot afford

Or are not given access access to healthy foods and grocery stores.

Every day, at 2:45,

I watch my students hop onto this leaking submarine of a school bus,

Every block bringing them deeper into an ocean where the only fish they find are fried,

Where fruits and vegetables just can't be found because there are no grocery stores here;

Just liquor stores and Popeye's,

Dunkin' Donuts, and 7-11's, children born into a neighborhood that fills more pollution than solution.

It is then I realize

That I am not too far from the deserts I once dreamed of.

See whether Anacostia or the Sahara, it doesn't make much difference because the [whole foods?].

Southeast D.C. is no different than the Serengeti

To them, brown-skinned little boys like my students are nothing more than walking cacti.

Just a piece of scenery, this world who taught everyone to stay awake.

Brianna

Literally has a landfill in her backyard

So she has a hard

Time convincing herself

The world then just thinks she's trash.

Restaurants come and dump the remains of food she'll never be able to afford

To eat three steps from her back door.

Jose

Eats fast food five days a week

Because his mother works three jobs to take care of six kids

And only sees her son when she arrives home from work

At the same time he's leaving for school.

He has gotten so big

That the excess fat ? his skin puts added pressure on his joints.

His knees are literally crumbling under the weight of this world.

Olivia

Watched her father shot two feet from her front porch.

She wants nothing more

Than to go outside and play at the park after school,

But gun violence has made a merry-go-round feel more like Russian Roulette.

So she doesn't go outside,

Simply eats any processed food from the cabinets

That will last long enough to prevent her from leaving the house too often.

These are my students,

My warriors,

Fighting a battle against an enemy they cannot clearly see.

These kings and queens,

Meant to feast not to fester,

But their zip code has already told them that their life expectancies are 30 years shorter than the county seven miles away.

I can see the faults of my own ancestry shaking in their eyes.

Diabetes and high blood pressure run through the roots of my family tree.

Heart disease is as much a part of my history as shackles and segregation.

So from my father's kidney transplant to Oliva's asthma,

These things are more than mere coincidence.

Both grew up in places more accustomed to gunshots than gardens.

So tell me place doesn't matter,

That the neighborhoods that are predominately healthy aren't the same ones that aren't predominantly wealthy.

Because when you're not choosing between buying your medicine and your groceries, health doesn't have to be a luxury,

Doesn't have to be an abstract concept that are presented in academic journals and policy briefs.

My students overcome more every day than I will in my lifetime.

They are the roses that grew from the concrete,

The budding oasis in the heart of the desert.

And their lives are worth far much more than the things that this world has fed them.

Answer the following prompts with no more than three sentences each.

• Prompt One: Why do you think place matters?  
• Prompt Two: What is "place" anyway?
• Prompt Three: And who does it belong to?
• Prompt Four: And who should it belong to?

Answers to these prompts are due at the beginning of Adventure Three.