Open Letter to another University of Michigan Ann Arbor Student/ Researcher that comes to Flint to learn what is Wrong With Us and after expensive research give us in return “Recommendations on How to Improve our Situation.” All of that while living in a Rich- Politically Correct Town- Ann Arbor.

Response to the researcher of” Raising Kids in the United States Today- American Dream Research.” Flier Left attached to the Community Bulletin Board of the Flint Public Library.
Several days have passed and the researcher has not contacted me (by responding to my email) nor seems to be interested in my very successful homeschooled son. I could assume that the researcher is interested in the other stories about Flint, and I could assume the researcher is interested in collecting data of the despair and poverty in Flint to compare with the other set of data from Farmington Hills.
So why do I not let this pass? Why am I sensitive to the issue that the University of Michigan researcher does not want to know the life of a home-schooled teenager that is truly living the American dream? Because it matters, because Flint is more than the simplistic caricatures that has been written all along. Because Flint also has happy endings. Because Flint is tired of been the feeder of researchers and not the beneficiaries of solutions.
I have decided to write this open letter with my opinions which are on one side asking people to change the narrative of misery and on the other to bring light to the challenges we have and work tirelessly and honestly to find solutions.
Based on the information I have found in the world wide webb about the researcher, it appears that she has worked and written on policy and poverty and yet, everything seems very much paper pushing presentations on seminars and beurocratic work in non-profit organizations. Does the researcher understand poverty? At the intellectual level, probably she understands.
That tired me, because I am on the trenches trying to improve the lives of the working poor by renting to people in Flint which is an entire research on human behavior in itself while the bureaucratic machine of public universities like the University of Michigan Ann Arbor use us like animal labs.
As a personal background, I understand the pressure of universities deeply. I know the belly of the beast, for my family in Argentina is full of professors. I am a product of the University Lab School in Tucuman, Argentina while my father was one of the founders of the public television in my home town (which was part of the university system). I married a professor whose first was working in Georgia Tech and now in Flint. I know how universities functions and how the money is used to feed the monster.
But what is painful for me to see is that universities attract the most talent individuals in our society and dilute their talents in a race to write more papers and have more grants to do research that only goes to support the huge university infrastructure. In Flint, we need serious, honest, committed and relentless researchers to do meaningful work, because if no, poor and violent people in Flint get victimized one more time.

I can not stop this researcher from writing about Flint and yet, since my children have been born here I have become that voice that is asking for serious solutions about poverty and youth violence in our city Flint.
I am asking to stop the insanity of the creation of mediocre programs and work in the tedious implementation and egoless evaluation to see what works and what does not. To move from the collecting data and writing soft conclusion to rigorous experimentation that could bring some results.
When you live in a city where the majority of middle class has moved to the suburbs and when you had worked hard as the president of the Mott Park neighborhood Association (did it for three years), and now as a landlord for the working poor, and when you attend the countless meetings that are supposed to help your community but do not, you get the real picture. The incentives are on the wrong place. The incentives are not in solving the complexities of poverty or crime but in keeping feeding the beurocratic machine of an economy of crime and poverty.
In Flint, poverty is an industry that provides jobs to lawyers, jails officers, huge beurocratic institutions, and employees of foundations, university researchers and medical residents that come to Hurley Hospital ER to practice on the the bodies of poor African American Youth, and the list goes on and on ( I know how that residency business work because I was a volunteer Spanish interpreter for the Spanish speaking population at the maternal and child care department at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, GA).
In Flint, MI there is a disconnection between the problems and the solutions, making the solutions sometimes more problematic than the problems. And the disconnection is the solution of research’s purpose is to learn about poverty but not to change, eradicate of move people to the next social class. And so, for people like me that do not escape to the suburbs after a long day of work at the hospital, health department, jail, law offices is painful to see the double tragedy of poor people in a city as a small as Flint.
Few people care to ask the deep questions, the ones that will risk researchers their long career and tenure. The questions are why there is poverty in Flint? Why there is violence in Flint? What do we do that create this soup that produces such results? Why a city that has so many churches produce so much violence? Why a city that has one of the richest foundations in the world cannot help improve the situation of children in Flint in a consistent and meaningful way that can be measured? Why a city that has so many universities cannot help the illiterate in Flint that one that does not have a chance to go to such universities? Why community colleges have such low graduation levels, especially in the numbers of African American and Latinos?
Why is liberating and dangerous word because asking why will uncover ugly corners. And it will require a humble heart that observes without preconceptions- yes everybody has an understanding and judgment of what poverty is and should be.
To understand poverty this researcher has to do more than “in depth interviews of 70- low-income African –American residents of Camden, New Jersey.” It would be beneficial for this researcher to live next to poor families for a month or six months and have them as neighbors; may then, the researcher will see the things she cannot observe, and maybe, maybe the researcher will understand poverty a tiny bit more.
Why we as a society produce high numbers of drop out students and why as a society we produce high levels of crime in a particular population are complex inquires. It makes us participants of a more interconnected web. We are part of that mess too. not the ones looking for the top down.
Asking why is hard. And the answers would require changes to a lot of the present programs that are a complete failure. Those programs most tend to have a paternalistic approach of “we know better.” Head start is one of them (and my advisor at the University of Michigan who passed away several years ago was a researcher in the field), not because on paper the program is bad but the reality and the implementation is something completely different As the writer of Freakonomics, “Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner put it so well that children in poverty “Instead of spending the day with their own undereducated, overworked mother, the typical Head Start child spends the day with someone else’s undereducated, overworked mother.” (I had the opportunity to observe that- because I wanted my children to relate with children from other social groups and race so I signed them to SKIP program in our neighborhood. There, I observed countless times the under prepared, undereducated teachers not being able to answer even the simpler questions that curious four year old children ask- like the name of the estates on a map that was on the floor of the play ground of that school which the teachers never learned. Well intended instructors had “high knowledge deficits” (E.D. Hirsch Jr.- the Knowledge Deficit).
Have we asked the poor what they need? Have we? Have schools in Flint have asked the teenagers what they need to learn to find jobs when they graduate? No, we continue selling them the middle class high school degree that from some of the public schools in Flint have zero value despite that the teachers continue making a good salary while blaming the children for not learning.
Poor children in Flint have only two things “brains and time” and we are the ones that waist their hopes of using both over and over. And do not let me start with all the researchers of the University of Michigan School of Public Health that comes here to collect data after data, and the students of the University of Michigan School of Architecture and Urban Planning that come to do graduate research on “changing neighborhoods like Mott Park,” with results that were pathetically disappointing
And if I feel frustrated by the superficiality of the comments and conclusions from researchers how do you think the people that the researcher interviewed feel?
I know how is to use and abuse governmental money. I worked for an architectural company in Atlanta that would go to public housing and do surveys…the tenants in the public housing projects were so hopeful that we would do something. And yet, we were there and paid handsomely to count how many roaches were per bedroom, how many windows were broken, how many burners on the stove were not functioning…
Why are we trying to change poverty giving things to children instead of changing behavior of parents? Because addressing the choices that certain mothers do is taboo. My short experience with rentals could attest that if the single mother has higher expectations for their children, the children do better, and yet who will do a research on that? It is not politically correct, so, we will continue spending money under the light of useless research because it is easy than the kind of research is needed.
Poverty is a serious matter and should be treated like that, because life is unfair and if in the lottery of life a child are born in a family that is poor his challenges at his door steps will be forever.
The researcher seems to be interested in inequality and stratification, and I believe that if we have as a goal to move children out of poverty and treat them like intelligent human being with full potential the implementations at school will be completely different.
Very little things could improve inequality, very little modifications could have tremendous impact, in the life of children in Flint, but that again requires that we care.
For example, children/ in general teenagers of single parents families who come from chaotic backgrounds tend to have problems dealing with anger and conflict management (they have seen most of the time their role models/adults in their lives get angry and shout or hit when under stress or frustrated), so often they get into trouble in the schools. And what public schools do in Flint? They send the students with suspension to home; a home that does not have adult supervision. After several suspensions, these kids are fresh meet to drug dealers, and gang recruiters looking for kids that are bored and with no money. Soon these teenagers are feeders to a life of petty crime, bigger crime, jails and lawyers and judges and the cycle repeats again.
If we ask why, we could create solutions. These are the kids that need school the most. They need to know that adults really care. They need to know that we are here to helped them navigate difficult childhood experiences, but nobody wants to talk in a problem solving mode. We do not talk about teenagers killing teenagers and in the process destroying the fiber of society, one family at the time. But that is what is happing in Flint in the poorest sectors or our society.
Why nobody acknowledge that crime is a taboo subject in families in poverty, and that parents do not want talk about it with their children? Why is that police does not want to educate people in the community about graffiti and the number of gang groups that are in Flint? May be because control of information is job security? Why is that schools in Flint do not have a central data base and when children move from school to school parents and teachers have to start from Zero? Is it because there is no collaboration between charter schools and public schools?
Why is that we never publish in the Flint Journal all the great success of charter schools in Flint that have helped poor families to have the luxury of options, something that middle class does not seem to understand? Maybe because the Flint Journal favor union organized schools (one time when I was the president of the Mott Park neighborhood Association and the International Academy of Flint had been mentioned in the News Week Report as one of the best High Schools in the Country and was not mentioned in the Flint Journal, a group of African American teenagers boys complained to me…”they- the journal never writes anything positive about us in the newspaper.”
Why is that everybody can converse about poverty but nobody acknowledge that money and money earning capabilities is a taboo subject in USA? Why is that money and money literacy is not a subject in the curriculum of what to learn in elementary school, middle school and high school? Is because teachers are not good about managing money either? And why is never a discussion of the correlation between knowledge about money and money accumulation?
Why is that money or pay day offices are close to poor neighborhoods next to pond shops but not banks? And both are legitimate business that take tremendous advantage of poor people?(read please, Broke, USA. From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. How the Working Poor Became Big Business by Gary Rivlin).
And why is always more money in the form of grants to collect data (and feed researchers) than into implement solutions that have been successfully tried in other parts of the country like the Harlem Children Zone – http://hcz.org/.?
Why is that with all the billions spent in research there is very little empirical research about poverty? What will happen if children are allowed to discuss money issues in groups’ settings? Will that open the doors to feel free to express the shame they have to be treated like second class citizens because they do not have money? Could they come out with creative solutions better that the ones we design for them? What will happen if schools teach teenagers about entrepreneurial opportunities as part of school curriculum? Could that have an effect on their future? Could children instead of receiving free breakfast receive vouchers and have the opportunity themselves to buy the breakfast…will they have a different respect for money and not dump all the apples in the streets like they do now in front of the school on University Avenue?
If the researcher is interested in the children of Flint? She can go to the International Academy and take some samples there and compare them with another Charter school students like Grand Blanc Academy, Madison Academy or Way Academy located the Flint Cultural Center. The researcher can go to Hurley Hospital and find some families there. Go to Dollar Stores around town and try to find some families or Waltmart. Go to Landmark Food Centers – http://landmarkfoodcenter.com/ and try to talk to the owners and recruit families there. Read the Currier and learn about the black churches and try to recruit there too- http://www.cpsaflint.com/. Go to the Flint Farmer’s Market and try to recruit there. Go to the YMC in downtown and try to recruit there. And if the researcher is interested in the Latino population, she can go to the churches that cater to Latinos in town. Go to “Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church- http://ologflint.org/
The American Dream varies in Flint from area to area, for real state determine part of the destiny. The researcher can recruit families in the Dort Hwy Corridor, the Pierson Rd Corridor-http://www.imagineflint.com/Portals/tempflint/Subarea%20Plan%201%20-%20Pierson%20Road%20DRAFT%2005062014.pdf
The East Side Corridor-http://www.imagineflint.com/Portals/tempflint/Subarea%20Plan%206%20-%20Eastside%20DRAFT%2005192014.pdf
Or the researcher can go to the Miller Road area where people with influence in the daily activities of the city live. Their children go to the new Powers Catholic School -http://www.powerscatholic.org/
But to do a meaningful research, about poverty and the American Dream, the researcher needs to dare to be different.
If the researcher wants to know what people in Flint thinks about the researchers that come to “study Flint,” she could read the comments of these three articles about the University corridor on MLive-1) http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2015/02/crime_hot_spots_identified_alo.html; 2) http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2015/03/university_avenue_grant_worker.html, 3) http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2015/02/university_avenue_corridor_gra.html
But there are some pockets of hope and like the author David Kord Murray and his book Borrowing Brilliance, it would be valuable for the researcher to learn what Esther Duffo is doing about povertyhttp://economics.mit.edu/faculty/eduflo/publications.-
Finally, the American Dream means different things to different people and while upper mobility is one of the marks of the American Dream it is also freedom to choose and for homeschoolers, there is not better country than United States where a minority group like African American are homeschooling in bigger numbers. Why? Because in United States- you can- http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/the-rise-of-homeschooling-among-black-families/385543/

More Scary than Halloween is How Little the Institutions and Leaders in Flint Care about Children of Limited Resources

 

“This is an opportunity to increase public safety in our community. This millage could pay for the equivalent of 50 officers and add – yes, add – to our police and fire departments.

Mayor of Flint

Once upon a time there was this idea that children in Flint had no value, so they would go to school and come home without back pack or homework…there were be no expectations for them to be or do anything of value in their day to day life and for their future. There were be not a solid plan of what would happen when they graduate, and if they graduate, for the curriculum at school is useless at best, and the opportunities in the city thanks to the present leaders equal to zero. So these children would wonder the streets of Flint with no direction and a lot of anger.

And there were be election time and the Mayor of Flint would plead for more money from fearful residents of Flint to put more of those angry children in jail with a mileage, that if it pass will bring more police officers and fire fighters in the streets. The  Mayor presenting his argument that incarceration is the brilliant Rhode Scholar solution to control the unruly, the angry, the ignorant, the adolescent that has lost any direction and hope, nor the desire to belong to a city that reject him or her because she is poor and uneducated.

Like Ansel and Greatel, the set up is to make them to waste their time while tempting them with easy money from drug dealing jobs, stealing for pawnshops or taking siding for metal scraping sites, to end up as criminals that feed the Flint industry of crime- the official one of lawyers,  parole officers, and all the insular industry of food, clothing that support the functioning of jails, or in the official language “Law enforcement and Public Safety, and the untrue name of correctional facilities…”

This system starts in the neighborhoods of Flint creepily ends up at the door steps of the City Hall building which houses the Flint Police Department and in front of the City Hall, the Jail…and how creepy it is that the most important buildings that surrounds the executive branch of government in the city of Flint are related to crime….

It is so, so scary for children of limited resources to live in Flint that a father (a neighbor on one of the properties I bought in MP) abandoned his home which has been paying for more than seventeen years to move and start a new life (as a renter) for his younger daughter in Grand Blanc. Having seen enough of the demise of lives of children in Flint, this father’s hope is that something better could happen to his younger daughter. After so much despair, cool selfishness from adults toward children, he had the courage to say no thanks to the city of Flint, not thanks to the schools in Flint, not thanks to the politician in Flint. He knew that by moving to Grand Blanc, his daughter would be out of danger of being killed not only physically but mentally and emotionally.

In Grand Blanc, she would encounter another type of people, people that would expect great things from her- she would have a future. The same child that in Flint, as African American of limited resources, was founded incapable of reading, and was giving an exercise class instead of extra help in reading, is considered in Grand Blanc intelligent and full of potential.

And like a great story, this child that had problems reading and that was receiving poor education in Flint schools moved to the Grand Blanc district and she has special classes and teachers that care and a backpack full of homework to do at home. Of course, she does not want to come back ever again to Flint, the city where the Mayor and all the other officials eat the children’s future. She knows better that Flint is a very scary place for poor children…UHHHHHHH

If you already connected in the neighborhood..

You already know who will be willing to make a little money

On the side dealing dope. You know in the ghetto there always be a whole bunch of young guys without work and without much to do looking for opportunities like this. They see the fancy clothes, fast cars, new sneaker and all that, and they want it. Many of them ain’t got much going on for them at home. If the police rolls up on them they face little penalties because they minors..

 Interviewed with Cash Money Pockets of Crime by Peter K. B. St. Jean

 

So when people in Flint tell you that Devil nights is dangerous and that houses are burning…you will know why… It is because angry adults one time were children in Flint and, nobody,       nobody cared for them, nor the teachers, nor the Mayor of Flint, nor their parents. And now they are burning deteriorated houses to take revenge, to burn their frustrations…

So, it is not Halloween that is scary in Flint. It is the Mayor and his political allies who are the scariest of them all! And from the children of limited resources with no parental supervision.. Flint is a very, very dark hole…a dungeon of not return…

“If you see a bunch of young kids hanging out on the corner when they

 should be in school or when it is too late for them to be out anyway, you know that they done gone wild. You know that they up to no good. At least that is how many drug dealers think. You need bodies to peddle the stuff so here is your opportunity. Sometimes you see them hanging on the corner like in front of a liquor store, a vacant lot or a house, and you already know that they be dealing there. But you see not all of them already be involved. Some of them are looking for that chance….In the same way, a drug dealer can pick young guys on the street corners because they be standing there waiting for something to happen, waiting for an opportunity. So that is how you get them….”

Interviewed with Cash Money  for Pockets of Crime by Peter K. B. St. Jean

UHHHHH, Halloween is not scary, what it is truly scary, it to be poor in Flint..UHHHH…and with no place to go than the liquor stores, dangerous parks, broken sidewalks, slam rental owners, police in big cars that patrolled the streets and find you a suspect…UH HHH Halloween is not scary, it is the politicians that blame your poverty for not making their job and so it goes…. You end up in jail and they end up in Washington feeling very proud of themselves….UHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

 

To Empower Teenagers in Flint is Very Simple.. Just Listen to Them.. Little Free Library in Mott Park- Flint MI for Teenagers

 

The new Mott Park Teenagers Little Free Library (Number- 2867)  is coming to 919 Frank St.

After observing that several of the teenagers in the neighborhood rarely used the FLL, a series of conversations conducted randomly during summer on Cadillac, Perry, Joliet, Norbert, Nolen and Frank and Dougherty brought to the attention that the FLL around MP do not have much books/magazines that are of interests of teenagers.

And so a group of teenagers decided to organize a FLL and started collecting magazines. If neighbors want to donate, the magazines could be dropped at 907 Frank.

List of Magazines Teenagers want to have in the FLL are:

Discovery Girls

Slam

Sport Illustrated

Baseball America

Teenagers’ graphic novels

Girl’s Life

Skateboarding

GamePro

Nintendo Power

Play station

Popular science

Popular Mechanics

Computer Gaming World

BMX Plus-

Comics- Batman, Spider Man, Wonder Woman, Captain America

Teen Graffiti

 

Thank you for helping this project!

Omid, Arezu, Erick, Nykoreyan

http://www.littlefreelibrary.org/

There is so many interesting pictures …take a pic at http://www.google.com/search?q=public+pictures&hl=en&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=1RFmUOSJLIuCyAHPoYFw&ved=0CFYQsAQ&biw=1366&bih=600#hl=en&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=free+little+library&oq=free+little+l&gs_l=img.1.0.0j0i24l9.10966.15802.0.17479.17.13.2.2.2.0.177.1502.5j8.13.0…0.0…1c.1.OoqwdHfjYaw&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=fa0843734d2fc98e&biw=1366&bih=600

Everybody is Leaving My Neighborhood but I Can’t

 

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

With a sorrowed face our next door neighbor has shared to my husband that they are planning to move to Flushing-a most middle class white suburb in Genesee County.

My husband has brought the “bad news while I was cooking, and asked me for the thousand times why we are staying in Mott Park.”

I answered with the same voice and clarity that I try to show to everybody that is looking at me- this crazy person that I am for staying in Flint when my family could buy a wonderful house in the suburbs and be “like everybody else” happy ever after. Truly?

I answered all the reasonable answers to my husband the engineer, the professor, the one that is supporting me even though he is not very convinced why I am doing this.

Yes, it is nice to live in a place where the house is paid and all the extra income is used for the tens of classes that my family takes at the marvelous Flint Cultural Center (the Flint Institute of Music, the Sloan and the Planetarium, the Flint Youth Theater and the Flint Institute of Arts). And it is nice to live in front of a wonderful park and a river and a university –Kettering University. It is nice to live close to the revitalized downtown Flint and the Flint Farmer’s Market and the Flint Public Library and the University of Michigan- Flint.

But there is something deeper that connects me with Flint and Mott Park and is violence and death and the desperate need to change things. A child that I have never met has been killed in the park in front of my house and that has changed all the equations.

http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2012/06/14-year-old_antonio_bell_jr_is.html

http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2012/06/family_friends_call_death_of_1.html

When my children were born (and I have to tell the truth, I desperately wanted my first child to be born in Ann Arbor), things changed forever. I did not want them to carry the horrible shame that people in Flint have for being “this abandoned child from rich parents who have let them rejected and pauper.

I wanted them to be happy to be from Flint because I believe we at birth are given a package with easy, and hard things to work our spiritual path.

Life is this complicated maddening ride that’s takes you places you never expected. I never expected to have the sorrow for the child who die in my park the last Friday before summer school started. Nor I expected him to be the driving force for me to try to do something, for something desperately needs to changed in Flint .

And yet, I am connected to this killed child like I have never been to anybody in Flint because his death is a chilling reminder that somebody somewhere needs to listen to this children. Yes, children that have crossed the threshold of humanity and kill themselves for nothing; children that only understand violence to clean shame, and on and on and on.

I am not poor, nor African American; yet, I know deep in my bones what violence does to a family, to a generation, to a country. I am a child of the sixties and I lived in Argentina during the “Dirty War.” I went to an intellectual university lab-school where numerous teenagers disappeared or where killed by the military-http://desaparecidos.org/arg/. I know what jail and shame does to a family because my uncle Donisio Rafael Fagalde was a lawyer-http://www.geni.com/people/Rafael-Fagalde-Lopez/6000000011605861295 and was sequestered, tortured and  killed by the military July 1^st 1975 when I was 16 years old .

And I know what is to be a teenager and be surrounded by secrets, and death and cold violence that is the way you feel when somebody you know disappears, or get killed. I know what is to have your family picture in the newspapers one day, and understand that nobody wants to talk about “that the event,” ever after the second day.

I know what is to go to church, the important church in the city Sunday morning with all the “preppy people and they look at you at this contaminated person …full of mess and blood and death.”

I know how the media and everybody wants to portray crime and violence like two separate groups- one good, the other bad .When in reality things are more complex.

And so, maybe Antonio Jr. Bell is my new voice, teaching me to talk about violence and anger and teenagers.

I know he that in a very crazy, messy inexplicable way, he is helping me to turn Mott Park, on NO at the time.

Marta

Changing Mott Park, One NO at the Time

Flint MI, August 18, 2012

….

Dear Ms:

In response to our phone conversation, I want to educate you in one of the reasons why Flint is in the state of decay that it is.

Yes, there are mountains of challenges, but one of them and maybe one of the most important is that leaders like you always say no. They do not lead, they demoralize us.

No, poor children can not learn (this is what public school educators expect from kids from poor families in Flint).

No, poor families can not live in peace (this is what social worker expect from kids and families from chaotic backgrounds in Flint).

No, poor children can not evade violence and crime (this is what police expect from poor teenagers in the poor areas of the city of Flint).

No, neighborhoods can not improve (this is what City Hall expect from changing neighborhood in Flints, like our Mott Park).

Why is that No is the most preeminent word in Flint? It is a long story, but because in our particular case I am caring about my chaining neighborhood, I will tell you few things.

 

In our conversation you dismissed me completely without knowing at thing about me…why because in Flint we have very low expectations for people, and things are in a certain way even if we are sinking.

In reality, probably I have more experience in things related to my neighborhood than you, and surely, more education and ideas how to improve Mott Park than you. Why? because I have high expectations about Mott Park than you.

See, what you do not know is that

1)  I come from Tucuman, a city in Argentina, so I know to languages.

2)  I travel around the world, so I visit cities and always learn what work and does not.

3)  I have a Master’s in Architecture from the University of Tucuman.

4)  I have a Master’s in Education from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

5)   I worked with “Architecto Sacriste,” who was a very well regarded architect in Argentina.

6)  I was the student assistant for the class History of Architecture in the University of Tucuman, so probably I know more about old cities than you.

7)  I worked in Atlanta in different architectural offices.

8)  But the most telling, is when living in Atlanta, my best friend from Peru was an urban planner and was working at City Hall. I learned thru our multiple conversations what good leaders do. In a few years, with a great number of leaders Atlanta moved from the sleepy Southern town that nobody expected much to a great town that everybody wants move and live there. Why? Because they dare to say YES…

 

But that is not all, in reference of Mott Park, I was the president of the neighborhood for three years, and now, I buy houses and try to find good neighbors. I also clean the streets and take the weeds, and care for the park, and try to convince neighbors to stay and now I am working in stabilizing the neighborhood, so when somebody like you in a simple phone conversation reply: “ Don’t even think about it..”

I want to say to you and to all the leaders in Flint that I will change my neighborhood and the children in my neighborhood “one NO at the time.”

 

Until next time, reflect on how your negativity and lack of imagination to solve problems and you attitudes that are more negative than positive are hurting Flint.

 

Sincerely,

 

Marta

Flint Has Always Been a Poor Town, Even When Tens of GM Factories were around. Poverty is Lack of Choices and that Abounds in Flint.

Flint is per excellence the definition of poverty

You have heard about the terrible things that happen in Flint when no hope, anger, ignorance and humiliation get combusted in the mind of young men? They kill themselves for pennies or phrases or honor…And now that summer has started Flint, and is hot and no money for anything…well you get the picture.

But please, do not get nostalgic thinking that Flint was before in the past because the truth is that has never being. Flint has always been a poor city and that make everybody very very angry.

Poverty is always equated with money because money gives you option, is the currency of choice. But also poverty is the lack of and in town the lack of voice and choices is monumental. People here are still treated like less than or in other words like poor.

When I came here from Atlanta several moons ago, I was amazed at how much Flint had in terms of services like two library systems, a cultural center, universities like Kettering University, University of Michigan, Mott Community College, Baker College, etc. parks, the Flint River in the center of the town, etc.

So why Flint feels and looks like a poor town?  Why Flint looks like things are patched with tape and ready to break into pieces at any moment?

I know, I know people will get offended by this but Flint has two things that makes it a poor town. It has a mono industry that is controlled by few hands. And it has not diversification. It is the same that happen in towns that have gold or copper and a group extracting the material and people with very few options that to work in the mines or nothing.

In Flint, even in the boom times, Flint was like a mine town, and worse because it has all the pretensions of a great city. Flint has a car to build disposable hands to work. Yes, it pays good, but it treat people like disposable and that is why in Flint  you have so many factories and next to the factories bars and bars and bars like the wild west.

So, although people had worked they knew and the managers of the factories knew and the managers of banks knew that people did not have choices. They were poor. Or you work in the factories for a good pay or you languish in the streets because nobody will hire a person that does not know how to read or write or know only to put tires in cars because that is what has done all his life….So, people like all poor people are trapped and that is why in Flint that sense that there is no escape is something it enters in your breathing like the humidity of a basement. That is why you see the comments of people in the Flint Live that feel more like old lions in a circus- they could do is make noise.

Poverty is the lack of choices and Flintonians have very few choices available, and being a democratic demagogic town, in the name of public good, Flintonians have less options than other places.  Schools are bad and waste children’s time. School designed in the industrial revolution to keep children out of the streets, pass them and graduated them to work in the factories, when reading or math was not a necessity. Schools tracked few children and that that is why Mr. Walling was selected to receive all the goods, he was going to college while the other kids NO.

So now, with an industry that is not a mono industry that controls all the sources, and a populations that is passive aggressive and that has learned to be caged in a corner, and a few businesses that want to continue making all the decisions and treating people like discarded items, we have a long way to go.

It seems very difficult for the few business to understand the we are all in this together and when the poverty of Flitnt get to them, they want to build gates like is happening at Kettering University and Hurley Hospital

What is so degrading about poverty is that carries a sense of a plague and nobody wants to be close to poverty just in case the hole eat them too.

But poverty and the lack of choices in Flint is eating all of us because like I say poverty is the lack of and in Flint we have lack of so many thing it “produces more “lack of.”

So I hope that makes you think, for to change Flint we need a new definition of poverty and a new acceptance that to change this town we need more than tracked bright kids (who are completely disconnected of poverty….they were the lucky one that scape the fate of the town), and charity and the good intentions of people that want to help the poor by making sure the poor continue being poor and not become an economic force…

Until them think in all they ways you also are poor, just because you were born in Flint.

Marta

The Miseries of Poverty Compound When People Equate Poverty with Stupidity…No Wonder the Kids in Flint Are so Angry..

In Flint poverty is our dirty word…

MWT

Living in a changing neighborhood has its miseries because as the population of affluence moves to the suburbs, you are left with a mix of middle class and struggling lower class, and strange things start to happen.

Yes, the stores surrounding the neighborhood not only start catering to that demographic, yes we have a humongous pawn shop around the corner, a cash check area, a one dollars store and the like, the same employees of those stores start treating you like an stupid human being.

In general because I have car and money I shop in stores that treat me with decency, but today, I had to buy a cough syrup in one of the drug stores around home.

While I was waiting to pay, I was observing the behavior of the cashier that was between paternalistic and downright insulting. Yes, in front of me there was an old African American man buying something, but did he deserve the treatment of being consider poor and stupid?

I imagine that the woman at the cashier who already is and struggling poor person felt good about herself to explain things like we could not add or subtract.

At the center of the discussion of poverty in Flint, we have to talk about all behaviors which alienate poor young men, that have received so many times the same concept in their schools that are convince they are not useful for anythineaseg more than blew our city in pieces…

Who says that poverty equate stupidity?

Please,  move this city we need to believe that we can and that means believing that we have a brain which is like a muscle that can be exercise.

So, when you see a poor person that has problem reading and writing, it is not that are stupid, the need to practice a little bit more.

And please do me a favor, if you can shop in places that treat you like a thinking person.

Thanks,

Marta

Responding to the Flint Journal : Oh no, let me count the number of ways why I am pleased Mr. Brown and not Mr. Walling is handling Flint Affairs

 

Dear SIR:

Responding to the article about “Governor should have picked Walling as emergency manager,” I have to respond “Oh no, let me count the ways why I am very pleased Mr. Brown and not Mr. walling is handling Flints affairs thanks to Governor Snyder.

Humbly I have to accept that I made a great mistake when I helped Mr. Walling in two campaigns to become Mayor of Flint, for I equated brain and education with good leadership. I made also another mistake because I equate his coming back to Flint for caring for the underprivileged residents. After all, he was the bright kid that did well and was bringing all his experience to use.

The truth is that Mr. Walling is rather a poor leader that does not connect with poor people and does not have interest in understanding nor learning the forces of poverty and crime in Flint (persons below poverty level in Flint- percent 2006-2010 = 36.6 % US. Census Bureau- Flint).

Everybody knows that Flint has lost job, and lost tax revenues. And everybody who could leave Flint for a better job or opportunity is moving out. What is left, it is a pool of poor people with little hopes, and lot of anger and frustration, especially poor young African American teenagers.

So, when the Flint Journal wrote “this weekend’s crime shows that too many people in Flint have lost the value of human life-” said by Mayor Dayne Walling in response of the death of Tommy J. Vaughn, a 16-year old victim, I want to respond: It is so easy for Mr. Walling- a politician in power and in control of the city affairs to blame young teenagers for their rather bad choices of violence over life. Because the other way around will be much humble and somber for Mr. Walling the leader to ask. Why so many children are killing each other under my leadership in our city? Why there are so many guns in the streets and I do nothing to stop it? Why I keep so many liquor stores open when the city is dwelling in population? Why I do not declare the city in an emergency state of an epidemic of crime and humbly ask for help?

Since Mr. Walling has become the Mayor the situation with crime has deteriorated specially in his neighborhood the College Cultural, Glenwood neighborhood, and my neighborhood-the Mott Park neighborhood where another child this time 14 years old Antonio Jr Bell was killed in the park a week ago.

Should I feel frustrated? Of course. Should I be pleased Governor Snyder is trying to bring some order to this city that is run by teenagers out-of-control and leaders in denial?

We could die of negotiation with the unions for pensions and better jobs but if crime is a plague that is destroying the city by repealing possible business for coming and making families fly away taxes will continue decreasing. Without taxes from residents who support the city nothing moves. Even the salary of Mr. Walling is paid by our taxes.

When Mr. Jerome Dallas talks about the destruction of liberty in the city of Flint, I want to ask where are the rights of poor teenagers from Flint? The only thing they have which is very little and it is time, it is being wasted by superficial adult rhetoric and ego because at the end of the day, in Flint we have teenagers that are dead, teenagers that will end up the rest of their lives in jail and teenagers that will become a parasite of the society with low self-stem and very few abilities to work on good paying jobs because they are absolutely un-educated.

When Mr. Dallas Winegarden Jr. writes “we are protecting our children’s future in a free society that takes care of the safety, health and welfare of all the people, not just the rich and powerful,” I want to drive him around some areas in Flint so he could show me where is the health, safety and welfare of the poor children in Flint because I do not see it, and I do not need to drive very far from my home. The children in Flint have no voice because nobody is accountable for them and if Governor Snyder at least acknowledges that Flint has a problem is more than anybody has done for these children in a long, long time.

We can talk and talk about the tyranny of democracy and all the good words but the reality of Flint requires common sense and caring two things that Mr. Brown is well known for. Ended, Mr. Brown has solid credentials on caring for children and the poor. And his expertises in those areas are welcomed in a city with an abundance of poverty and problems created by poverty. Please read Mr. Brown experience with Red Cross, United Way, Youth counselor, at Wikipedia- Michael Brown.

Finally when Mr. Jerome Dallas Winegarden writes that we will not be surprised by the “horrible decisions Mr. Brown will make.” I want to say that I welcome Mr. Brown with open arms because he makes decisions that we need while Mr. Walling has done none.

And for Mr. Dallas Winegarden I suggest him to sell his expensive car and donate all the money to the poor children of Flint in that way, for sure, his father would truly be eternally proud of him.

Marta Wyngaard

In Flint, we want the “other child,” that killed Antonio Bell Jr to get looked in jail, so we could forget about this nightmare…and soon.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.
Mahatma Gandhi

When a child choose death over life at a young age of 14, what does it say about us society?

When and how are we passing this child the information that life is so cheap? Where has this child learned that disagreements are solved with blowing the brain of another child in few seconds?

When and how this child has understood that he was alone in this world and that his life hanged from the power and inexperience of another 14 year old teenager?

When society closes the loop with a simple equation of A+B+gun= death, then there is very little to add. The A+B+ gun becomes a given, something that we are not planning to analyze, nor ask the important questions that need to be answered. And so blame take a live into itself.

“He was not from Mott Park, maybe he was in drugs, maybe he was in something bad, maybe was his fault to listen to the other boy..”

The reality that nobody wants to uncover in Flint is much more complex. This child is dead because a mountain of little things that were supposed to go well went wrong and so, all this things added to a turning point  moving in a  direction that ended in an abysm.

So, I will, like I did today, keep searching for answers because this is what I have …his name, my park, his death, my sorrow, the unfairness of violence, and a desire to stop it forever!

Until next time, start seeing yourself as part of the solution, if not we will have a very sorrowful summer…

Marta

 

He does not live in Mott Park, doesn’t he? And in an strange way Antonio Bell Jr. will always be part of Mott Park…

That is what neighbors were comforting themselves after the death of Antonio Bell Jr. in our park.

Why? Because by making him a child that is not from here, it gives us permission not to worry anymore…he was not from here, he was from the poor area in town.

And so, his poverty does not infect our souls and we can continue pretending that poverty does not exist.

For me, that sheer of denial is broken, and although he was not my child, he will be in my soul for the rest of my life.

I have never seen him, and yet, his death as affected more than any words I can say, for I have a son who is fourteen and I cherish him like the most valuable treasure in my world.

And so, I am in a quest of ending violence in Flint for the poor youth in Flint…will I succeed? Who knows, the only thing I know is that if I continue thinking that he was not from here…he will never be.

And it is something I can not do…I can not walk in the park, the park I love so much, pretending nothing has happened. Mott Park, the place I have taken my children to play since they were little. In that same place violence has destroyed a child because …and the list is so long…because he was alone…because…violence is a way of life in Flint…because ..we adult care little about poor teenagers that live in Flint..etc.

And so, this young man who was a total stranger until yesterday has become my guidance to ask me to do something…it is time to do things different…it is time to see teenagers that are poor as children that have potential and that their lives are as valuable as any other child in Flint…could we say like the children who will attend Powers?

I am walking a path that is new to me, for I am not white, nor black, nor from here. Yet I can feel the anger, frustration, shame, desperation, of teenagers in Flint that have nothing to lose than their lives…isn’t that so absolutely sad…

Until next time, help me to think new ways to solve the problems of youth violence in Flint.

From the bottom of my heart,

Thanks

Marta