Goals Reviewed

Another week in downtown Fresno, and it has been a full one! Weekly summaries are difficult, because I find it hard to know where to begin- if only I had time for daily ones! So I'll try to break it down in sections:
At my site: The past week has generally been only 2 kids while I'm at Fresno Street Saints in the mornings, and although I had a great time with those 2 kids and saw Jesus in them in the joy and fun they had, I struggled with feeling that a government funded enrichment program should probably have more kids involved, and the planned "structured recreation" didn't seem so structured. I'm pretty good at going with the flow of things, but because the site director was rarely around, and the other 2 volunteers were unclear on the protocol, I wanted more structure. On Friday we had staff training with all the interns and staff from the 3 Fresno Street Saints sites, and it was there that I was hoping to get some answers. I did not want to come in, however, thinking that I knew how an inner city youth program was supposed to be run, but I was hoping to at least find out what the goal of the program was and if there were any rules, and many of the interns had similar questions. At the training, the director, John, asked us what we thought these kids would be doing were they not spending the day at Fresno Street Saints. I hadn't thought of that. They would probably be bored and at home in their unstable environments, and would probably be getting into trouble. He also said that a lot of these kids haven't learned social skills, and the general response that they have learned in their environments is to fight back instead of talk. Fresno Street Saints wanted to provide another option. We did talk about having more structure and actually following the schedule, but I had an enlarged view of the program, and wasn't in so much need of structure. But getting the kids to stick around would be nice. Today we definitely improved in that area, and we had 5 kids instead of 2!