Good news from San Francisco

January 22, 2007
San Francisco

I have a second-grade student, Sariyah, whom I tutor in the After-School Program at Raphael House. She's very serious, and doesn't let me get away with much. Last week, I tried telling her an elephant joke.

"How do you put an elephant in a refrigerator?" I asked.

"You can't do that -- it would hurt the elephant. He would be too cold and he wouldn't be able to breathe."

A few months ago, one of her classmates, Jenny, cut out a paper set of eyebrows and a musketeer's goatee, and taped them on her fact. Jenny came walking into the tutoring room wearing this. I saw Jenny and cracked a smile. Sariyah shook her finger at me and said, "We're working."

This isn't to say that she doesn't have a sense of humor -- she does, it just comes out at odd moments. One day, her father and 18-month-old brother came to pick her up.

I said to Sariyah, "You should be nice to your brother because he's a boy and some day, he'll be bigger than you."

"So should you," she replied, "because when that happens, you're gonna be dead or really old."

She's one of our most hard-working students, and I think, one of the most intelligent, although one wouldn't have guessed it when she first came to Raphael House a year ago. She read words in books very, very slowly, sounding out every syllable, and when she wrote, she spent about a minute and a half on each word, crafting every letter perfectly on the page. I encouraged her to go faster, but she wouldn't hear of it -- she wanted to get it right the first time.

Her language abilities were a bit behind her classmates' partially because she was learning English as a second language -- her family immigrated to the United States three years ago -- but I soon realized that her slowness was because she was a perfectionist. For her, this turned out to be more of a help than a hindrance. She had wonderful learning techniques, often while we were practicing spelling words, she would scold me if I didn't cover the words with my hands. "I won't learn them if I can see them! I have to have them in my mind," she said. Her knowledge base was limited, but she knew how to expand it.

Children who have been homeless are often mislabeled as "special needs" because they're behind in their academic abilities. But, their problem is usually a lack of a place and a time to study. We have an average of 28-30 children in the After-School program, and when they come on a regular basis, it's amazing to see them improve.

Sariyah's now about where she should be for a second-grader, and she can read books to me with minimal help. She's a remarkable child for another reason -- she comes from an intact family, unlike most of the families we serve, 75 percent of which are headed by a single mother. Her family is functional and healthy, and both the parents are hard-working, but even with the jobs they had upon arriving in San Francisco, they couldn't pay the rent, and they came to live in the Raphael House family homeless shelter. They were here for a few months at the beginning of 2006, and then they were able to move into transitional housing, and now they have an apartment of their own. Even though they don't live at Raphael House any more, Sariyah still comes to our tutoring program every day.

She has an unusual amount of social grace for a child her age, often asking me what's wrong if I'm tired or sad. Sometimes she and her classmates get philosophical, too, and I learn quite a bit.

Once, I was helping a classmate of hers, Jenny, with compound words, and Jenny whined, "I don't ge-e-e-t it."

I said, "A compound word is when you have two small words that make something else when you put them together. You know what a dog is? You know what a house is? A doghouse is something different."

"I still don't get it," she said in the same tone.

"What's a boy?" I asked.

"A person," she answered.

"What's a friend?"

"Someone you like."

"Well, a 'boyfriend' is someone a girl might kiss," I said, and Jenny, Sariyah and the two other girls at the table recoiled in disgust. Sariyah pulled up her jacket over her face to hide from the thought.

Jenny told me in her most authoritative voice, "No, it's not. A boyfriend is a boy you're friends with, which is more better. You don't do that."

Sariyah extended her hands out to her sides as if they were a scale. With one hand, she said, "That's in high school that the kissy stuff happens." With the other hand, she said, "Now, you don't do that."

Hearing Jenny tell me how it is made me happy. She's a girl who comes from a difficult family situation. Her family stayed at Raphael House twice. During the frist stay, her youngest brother was born, and our staff didn't know her mother was pregnant until she went into labor. (She was too shy to tell anyone.) During the second stay, Jenny's parents' marriage fell apart with both physical abuse and her father abusing drugs and getting deported.

Last year, Jenny would get into "moods" in which she was impossible to deal with, once standing in one place and spinning in circles for 45 minutes because she couldn't have her way. Also, once I had to restrain her by the arms to prevent her from running into traffic, and she squirmed and wrestled to try to get away (this failed; I have a mechanical advantage) and then she started stomping on my feet.

Now, she doesn't get into these moods, and given how well she explained the dangers of dating to me, she may just stay out of trouble as she becomes a young lady. (Another time, she shared a delightful joke with me: What do you call a pig who knows karate? Pork chop.)

I got an excellent bit of theology this week when Sariyah and Anthony, a third-grader, were talking about their futures.

"When I grow up, I'm going to be a babysitter," said Sariyah.

"When I grow up, I'm going to be dead," said Anthony.

I interjected, "That's true, but what are you going to do before you're dead?"

He answered, "Before I'm dead, I'm going to die."

"No, I mean what job will you have?" I asked.

"I'm going to be a doctor and cure people and then I'll die and I'll be dead after that, and after that I'll be dead and after that I'll still be dead."

Sariyah opined, "I don't want to be dead. I want to live forever."

I said, "There's the Resurrection, when God will bring all the good people back to life."

Sariyah said, "That's right. He's the greatest, biggest, most perfilous person in the universe."

"Perfilous?" I asked.

"I said powerful. He made everything and can do anything. He's everywhere."
Sariyah and Anthony began to chat about their day at school, while I pulled out a piece of paper to record the above conversation so I could remember it to write it here.

"What are you writing?" Anthony asked.

"Something to my girlfriend." I answered.

Sariyah sneered and said "ew." A minute later, she said, "I know her. She's got black hair and glasses and white skin, and she was here on Halloween."

Anthony added, "And you like her."

"Yes," I said, "I'm going to marry her."

Sariyah recoiled again and said, "We don't need to know that."

There was another pause in the conversation. Anthony stood up to get a glass of water, then tried repeating an old joke. "When I grow up, I'm going to be dead." (I should note here that his jokes are usually funnier, such as: Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to the other slide.)

"I'm not going to laugh at that. It's not funny anymore."

He hugged me and said, "When I grow up, I'm going to be tall."

"How tall?" I asked.

"As tall as you!"

"You have to eat your vegetables and exercise to do that."

"And eat cake," he added.

Sariyah interjected, "When you eat vegetables, you get bigger this way," and put her hand above her head. "When you eat cake, you get bigger THIS way," and extended her hands to her sides.

A few minutes later, Anthony started his homework. He had a picture graph in which a smiley face represented six children. One question asked him to use smileys to represent three children. So he drew half a smiley. The next question asked him to represent nine children. He drew an upside-down smiley.

"Why'd you do that?" I asked. "Why not one and a half smileys?"

"One smiley is six," he said. "And nine is an upside-down six, so nine is an upside-down smiley."

THE ENGAGEMENT

You may have noticed that I mentioned to the kids that I'm getting married. This is true. You may also wonder why I buried it so deep in the story, and it's because I'm testing whether this story is compelling enough to drag you this far into the text. If you're still reading this, maybe it's a funny story. That, or you're still reading because you're hoping I'll give the punchline to the elephant joke. (Open the door and put him in.)

So, the engagement. Yes, I gave my lovely girlfriend, Miriam Ruth Moser, an engagement ring on Tuesday night, January 16, which was also her 27th birthday. So now she's my fiance, and we're looking to get married in the summer of 2008. She wants to go to school and go through a one-year training program in zookeeping, and we're looking to get married after she's finished with that program.

I met Miri at church at the end of July, and we've been dating since Sept. 21. I met her family over Thanksgiving, and she met my family over New Year's, and we've just been having the most lovely time together. I'm so excited about all of this.

Here's a link to some photographs:

http://www.pbase.com/allears/gallery/engagement

Keep in touch!

In Christ,
Thomas Eric Ruthford

p.s. If you want to know more about Raphael House, you can click here:

http://www.raphaelhouse.org/