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| DV Julia Butts |
Our latest blog post comes from Julia Butts.
Julia serves at the St. Francis Center, a center that supports low-income families in Redwood City California. Julia works as a teacher and shares her processing of an experience with one of her students.
If you can dream it, you can do it
The goal of the activity was to have the children think
about where they had been and where they want to go by creating a timeline of their
past, present, and ideal future. We were learning about advocacy, and I wanted
them to learn that self-advocacy is a critical tool for achieving our goals.
They started scribbling away on their pieces of paper…all but one of them. I
asked why he wasn’t writing.
“I can’t do this.”
Why?
“It’s too hard. The past is too hard to think about. It’s
too bad.”
Okay, then focus on
the future. What do you want to do in the future?
“Restart.”
What do you mean?
“I want to get a restart on the past.”
Okay, well if you can’t
go back in time, but have to go forward, what do you want to do? What do you
want to see? What are your dreams?
“I don’t know.”
Do you want to
graduate high school?
He shrugged.
Do you want to
graduate college?
He shrugged.
Do you want to have a
cool car some day?
He shrugged.
“I don’t know. I don’t have any dreams. I just want to
restart.”
The conversation continued this way, and I started to feel
at a loss for words. Looking into his eyes he just seemed so downtrodden, pessimistic,
and dreamless. Fortunately the program
director entered the classroom, and I called in his aid while I proceeded to
check on the other students. My heart, however, remained heavy.
Theoretically, I knew there were kids in the world whose
situations were dire and whose pasts were difficult to such a degree that they
struggled to believe that they were loved and capable and that the future could
be bright. I knew there were kids who struggled
to dream any dream at all, be it big or small. I knew this. But I had never seen it, in
person, so starkly. Traveling the world, having a family, getting a cool job
like being a professional ballerina or the president—dreams like those came so
easily to me as a child, and to every child I’d previously met.
How do you inspire a child, only eleven or twelve years old,
to work hard, to value themselves, to simply be happy, if they cannot be
motivated by dreams? How do you show them that despite the undeniable influence
of the past, it is not a complete determinant of their future? How do you help
them to see their past as an asset that brings them strength and wisdom? How do
you help a child dream?
The adage goes, “If you can dream it, you can do it.” I
never really thought about what happens if you can’t even dream it.
Thinking about this experience, I remembered a poem by
Langston Hughes that was featured in the play A Raisin in the Sun, which I read when I myself was back in middle
school. It’s called “Harlem,” and it
goes:
“What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
Like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?”
But I’m hopeful. For every child I meet in my work who
struggles to dream, I meet many dozens more whose dreams are vivid and
beautiful despite their struggles. For every child I meet who struggles to
dream, I have a coworker working dutifully to help that child generate the
optimism necessary for dreams. Without a doubt, I have hope for a world in
which dreaming comes naturally for every child.
What a wonderful world it would be. :)
