Ancient Kids

Today I went to the Lower East Side to help shoot a little video about a recycling project, starring local kids and tweens who are involved in the After-School Services program at the Henry Street Settlement (http://www.henrystreet.org/programs/youth/after-school.html). 

Katha is the Director of the program, and she is phenomenal with these kids.  And the kiddos themselves are a phenomena all on their own.  Sweet, polite, energetic, and enthusiastic – two of them in particular really pulled on my heartstrings.  One was a girl from Puerto Rico who, highly against her will, was moved to NYC about a year ago.  She had a very pretty-sounding name which I won’t even attempt to spell correctly.  You look into this girl’s big, brown, tween-aged eyes and you see a very old soul – very serious, very intelligent, and very sad.  She’s angry about being forced to leave her homeland, and hates New York, she says.  However, she did participate willingly (if not a bit methodically) in the activities, even though she wore her heart on her sleeve the whole time.  She smiled sadly, responded to questions with impressive confidence and poise, and even helped me figure out how to play back my footage on the camera I was using.  Confound it!  All that time fiddling around with DSLRs, and I forgot how to work a standard tape camera.  Silly me.  Good for her!

The other kid I especially liked was a 10-year-old boy named Joshua – yet another very serious, introspective soul who very astutely pointed out that the world is in a lot of “trouble”.  You can sort of tell when kids are just repeating stuff they’ve heard their parents say, or mimicking something they saw on TV, as opposed to when they really mean something because they’ve thought about it (and yes, probably worried about it too).  Josh means it, and he thinks and worries about this stuff.  Probably more than a 10-year-old kid should.  As he walked by me to sit back down, I complimented him on his performance in front of the camera.  He paused briefly, looked me straight in the eye, and very frankly said, “Thank you.”  He will do well, I think.  As long as he doesn’t let the woes of the world drive him into despair.

I found it just a little bit amusing that the first field project I was set to work on had to do with recycling.  Back home, I drive people crazy when I catch them throwing away a recyclable plastic, or using those god-awful plastic bags, because it drives me crazy to see something like that thrown into the trash.  I even started a pathetic campaign at Gore to try to get people to recycle those stupid little plastic creamer containers that are so rampantly used at the coffee station there (and yes, I called the local recycling company to confirm that those things are indeed recyclable). 

I don’t even want to get into what it was like trying to get those people to simply follow a minor request, which I clearly posted on the recycle container, asking, could they please simply remove the non-recyclable lids from the containers before dropping them into the bin?  Nope.  Sorry.  Too much to ask for some people, because I would invariably find several thrown into the bin with the lids still on them – even though in order to pull the lid off the container, all one needs to do is, gee whiz – pull a little more. 

What confounded me the most, however, was when I’d glance at the trash can not three feet away from the recycle bin, and see dozens of plastic creamer containers tossed directly into the trash.  And the trash was actually farther away from the coffee station than the actual recycle bin.  It was like they were going out of their way NOT to recycle.  But I digress… 

So yeah – pretty comically serendipitous to find myself helping some kids make an instructional video about how to recycle plastic, glass, paper, and aluminum. 

Take THAT, you Corporate numbskulls.

For the video, we had to scrounge up examples of each type of recyclable in order to demonstrate which items go into which bins.  So I quickly sprinted across the street to the little playground/park area and rifled through the little public trash bin, fishing out a glass bottle and an empty Pepsi can.  You should have seen the stares I got.  :) 

On my way home after the shoot, which involved walking a few blocks through the LES and catching two different subway trains, I overheard at least four different languages.  One was Asian, another African, and two different variations of Latino, or Spanish – but not the Mexican Spanish I’m used to hearing.  And walking through Queens on Tuesday, I found myself in the middle of “Little India” – a tiny subculture area near the subway line that I would swear has specifically been recreated to look exactly like the streets of Mumbai. 

Indeed, the Big Melting Pot for cultures from all over the world is right here in New York, and I get to experience it (as well as melt into it myself) a little more each day that I have to go somewhere I wouldn’t otherwise have gone, had I still been exploring as a tourist.  I’m looking forward to discovering more nooks and crannies around the City that aren’t listed in the New York for Dummies book, as well as meeting more kids from all over the globe who were born (or quickly became) older than their parents.