Читать книгу Hades' Melody - JD Belcher - Страница 12

August 2000.

I received my call while relaxing at home one very warm early evening, after a hard day’s work at Technical Services. At the beginning of the summer, I had moved from Louisa Street in Oakland to a compact, third floor apartment atop a house in Highland Park. It was a peaceful, quaint neighborhood in the northeast section of Pittsburgh. The street was lined with towering oaks that added shade to Fulton Elementary School across the street and Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church a block away. AJ, the only remaining trace of my college days at Pitt, and I were roommates again.

The house was on the corner of Hampton and Mellon streets. Each floor was its own separate apartment. The tiny front yard was circled by a low hedge, which went around the Mellon Street side of the building and along the equally miniature backyard. A large front porch spanned the entire width of the house, and a six-foot walkway separated us from the neighbors next door.

Three garbage cans lined the alleyway on one side, one for each floor. A steel fire escape, painted black, wrapped around the other side and went up to my living room window.

The first-floor apartment was occupied by a heavyset black woman in her forties. She lived with her fifteen-year-old daughter. They had never mentioned a father, and as far as I knew, she was raising the girl alone. On the second floor, a brunette in her thirties lived alongside a beautiful white husky with pale blue eyes. My apartment was a charming, loft-style space at the top of a long flight of carpeted stairs. Inside was a living room, a small kitchen, a bedroom, and a spacious bathroom. The place had been furnished with Persian rugs, a dinette set, a couch, and a queen-size bed. The landlord had even left behind three cans of paint if I ever decided to do any small touch ups.

When I answered the phone, I heard the baritone voice of Brother Gil on the line. Coco, my gorgeous Himalayan cat, who had bright azure eyes and brown paws, curled up against my leg. She had been given to me as a Christmas gift from Brian’s sister the year before.

“Hello, Jovon,” he said with his deep, rumbling voice, one which always seemed to startle me whenever I answered his calls. “How are you doing this evening?”

“Good, good,” I echoed, repeating the word nervously. “How are you, Brother Gil?”

“I’m doing wonderful,” he said hurriedly. “I also have Brother Leon on the line…”

“Oh,” I said, responding to the surprise. “Hi, Brother Leon. How are you?”

“I’m doing well,” he answered.

Brother Gil spoke first.

“Because of the commitment and diligence you’ve shown in your involvement with BK, we believe that God rewards his people, those who faithfully serve him.

You have been involved in this program since the age of thirteen, and while you were in high school and college, you followed our steps and served as a big brother to the children of single-parent mothers, children who weren’t your own. But because God said so, you have been obedient in this ministry. You have spent your time after long days at work, time you could have been using to do a number of other things, to volunteer in this ministry with helping young men to achieve excellence…”

I sat down on the floor and stared at the carpet.

“In the same manner, we are going to be obedient to God towards you. In the past, we were your big brothers. Brother Leon, Brother Rob, Brother Dave, and all the others. As you know, we, the board of governors, have been investing in the lives of young men like yourself for over ten years, to those who don’t have fathers in their lives, and by overseeing the daily operation of the ministry of BK. However, we believe God is doing something new. We believe it is time to bring in the next generation of leadership to BK. We want you to come on board with the rest of the men and become a member of the board of governors. We have acquired some money to create the position of program coordinator for BK. I took the baton from our chief overseer Leon Haynes and assumed responsibility for organizing the meetings every Wednesday, along with the other tasks needed to continue with this ministry. What we want to do now is pass the baton to you. You have demonstrated the commitment. You have been faithful to what God has called you to do, and we want to know if you are interested in becoming the Brothers Keepers Program Coordinator…?”

When they offered a salary exceeding what I was making at Technical Services to join the board of governors team and pitched that I would be the first protégé of the next generation of big brothers, I liked what I heard.

“Pray about it,” Brother Leon said before I could breathe a word of response. “You don’t have to give us an answer now. We don’t want you to think that this is something you have to do. Think about it for a week and then give us an answer.”

“Okay,” I said, flattered and at a loss of words. “I just want to say thank you for all you have done and for considering me for the job.”

I admired and respected these men with an almost saint-like reverence and felt as if I were being selected to be a member of the Supreme Court.

“Let’s schedule a meeting a week from now in my office,” Leon said. “You can give me an answer then.”

A week later, I rode the 71C bus down Penn Avenue and got off in front of a sign that read, Welcome to Wilkinsburg. The butterflies flapped their wings, and the birds sang their praises as I walked past the McDonald’s, then the Burger King up to Wallace Avenue.

Brother Leon’s office was on the third floor of the once abandoned Horner School, now transformed into the Hosanna House Community Center. I was met by an attractive secretary, who called to inform him of my arrival. I felt as if I were doing something important, as if this were very serious business, a solemn contrast to the work I was performing at Technical Services. After the call, the secretary smiled, then gave the okay for me to go down the hall to his office.

Garnished with a black African motif, the office walls were decorated with colorful wallpaper. Tiny wooden sculptures stood on the end tables. To my left hung a bulky painting of a dark-skinned warrior wearing golden body armor and holding a spear while standing at his post in front of an intricately designed, arched gate.

I thought it to be the perfect symbolic image of Brother Leon. In the middle of the office, there was a desk with two chairs in front and a leather seat against the wall. On the other side of the desk sat Brother Leon. Behind him was a shelf which housed a baseball bat and a football, each covered with the signatures of the players from the Pittsburgh Steelers and Pirates franchises. Humbled, I sat in the left chair in front of his desk.

“Hey, Von!” he said, turning toward me with a large smile on his face, revealing his white teeth, “Give me one second here.”

As he went through some papers on his desk, my palms began to sweat. I felt so small in his office, yet I admired his style. He finally settled, leaned back in his chair, and waited for me to speak.

“I decided to accept the Brothers Keepers Program Coordinator position,” I said. “I’ve given my job at Facilities Management a two weeks’ notice, so I can start work any time after then.”

“This position requires a two-year commitment because of the funding component,” he said. “Will you be able to make that commitment?”

“Yes, I’ll commit to two years,” I responded in a pact that would haunt me for years to come.

On my first day of employment as the official program coordinator of BK, my second real job since graduation after I had left Technical Services, and several years after I began volunteering as a big brother, I spent most of the day walking back and forth, and up and down Wallace Avenue in Wilkinsburg, between Hosanna House and the historic Wood Street church building.

CCOP used to hold its services at that location, but since the recent construction of a new church site on Andrews Drive in the East End, the old location was only used as a business office for smaller activities like the Youth or Singles Ministries and the main sanctuary for weddings and funerals.

From its very beginning, BK traditionally held its Wednesday evening meetings at the Wood Street Church in an area behind the main sanctuary. Functionally, the program was an auxiliary ministry within CCOP and therefore utilized many of the church’s resources. For example, most of the big brothers were members of CCOP, and a requirement of acceptance into the program for big and little brothers alike was church attendance.

However, due to the increased growth of Hosanna House, many of the facilities like the gymnasium and recreational centers were used by BK more and more.

The position of program coordinator was the first of its kind. Never in the history of BK had someone been paid to perform the duties of managing and supervising all its responsibilities. Brother Gil had taken on the task as a volunteer, using his own time and money over the years, doing what he often referred to as the service of God. So, as I waited for many of the administrative details to come together, my patience was often stretched beyond its normal limits. Unlike Pitt, where many of its departments had been around for over a century, BK, moving under the umbrella of a grant-funded program with a financed manager, was only in its infantile stages.

During several planning sessions about the further development of BK, the topic of change and taking the program to another level of ministry had often surfaced.

As program coordinator, I recognized that an important first step in this direction would be to move the center of operations away from the Wood Street facility and into the Hosanna House Community Center. I believed the perfect rationale for such a move was that the location change would ultimately make BK more accessible to the community.

When I talked with Brother Leon about my office, he said that a space would be set up for me at the Wood Street business office, but I asked him if I could have an office in Hosanna House. I argued that BK seemed to occupy the rear sanctuary at Wood Street for the Wednesday evening meetings just as much as it had done at Hosanna House for activity, recreation nights, and other events, and he agreed. In my mind, if I was truly serious about moving the program away from the church, why not start with the program coordinator?

Instead of having my own office, I ended up sharing a space with Brother David Baird in the Youth Center on the first floor of Hosanna House. He had the responsibility of directing a school-based youth program in the Wilkinsburg Middle School next door, in addition to his youth leadership role at CCOP. I couldn’t believe it. The importance of the level of my new job quickly began to sink in as I found myself next to Brother David, who I still saw as Pastor David from my days of being involved with the Youth Ministry.

The office was located in the back of a recreation room. It had no windows, and the walls were thickly painted concrete blocks. A door was the only barrier separating us from the chaos of the pool, air hockey and foosball tables outside.

On the third floor of Hosanna House, there was a yet-to-be renovated auditorium—minus the theater seats—used as a storage area for furniture and other office related items. Piles and piles of donated equipment loomed in every direction. As far as the eye could see, there were dusty desks, tables, chairs, computer monitors, hard drives, office equipment, and boxes full of all the things that made a community center operate.

I was told to choose a desk to place in the office. Two immaculate cherry oak executive desks immediately caught my attention. When the movers brought one of them down to the office, I noticed that it barely fit through the door and looked totally out of place. Having them in the recreation room office was kind of like an auto mechanic wearing a suit. When Brother David saw the desk, he said he wanted one too, and the next day, the other was placed inside. A Hosanna House phone line and a voice messaging system was set up for BK—another progressive action to move the program away from Wood Street—although there had been one already set up at the church.

The biggest problem that I encountered during the early developmental stages of the BK program coordinator position was the lack of my ability, and the nonexistent support of others in the program to understand the patterns of the job and therefore create a work schedule to accomplish its tasks. When I was employed at Technical Services, I had gotten used to a standard nine to five shift. Unfortunately, this time frame wasn’t practical for BK. Shortly after I was hired, Brother Leon gave me a warning about not filling up my plate with too much of all the work that there was to do around Hosanna House, and at the time, I mistakenly thought I’d be able to handle whatever it was that he was suggesting. But he was right. Before long, I found myself being pulled in many different directions, helping with other youth programs in Hosanna House that had nothing to do with BK.

The difficulty stemmed from the 9:00 a.m. start time I imposed on myself. Most of the kids in the BK Program were in school until three or four o’clock. Since a large part of my work involved calling the younger brothers and their mothers and talking to them about any issues they may be having at home or in school, this couldn’t be done until five o’clock. Sure, there were a few facility issues that could have been taken care of during the day, like making sure the rooms were ready and set up for the Wednesday evening meetings at the Wood Street location or for activity night at Hosanna House. But other than that, I had been left with an enormous amount of daytime hours where I had nothing to do.

I was given a salary with no overtime pay, so no matter how many hours I worked, my income remained the same. Because of my own ignorance about this matter, I blindly accepted the task of also managing an after-school tutorial program with AmeriCorps volunteers from Pitt in the Wilkinsburg Middle School next door to Hosanna House. Three days out of the week, I tutored math, English, and social studies without pay. And unlike working in Technical Services at Pitt, I had no direct supervision to prevent the mistake of this overlap in duties. Most of my supervision came from Brother Gil, who would call in the mornings to give me daily BK

tasks to accomplish. He checked up on what families I had talked to the day before, suggested topics of discussion for the upcoming meetings, and made sure things were prepared for activity night. But most of all, he did what pastors did best—encouraged me.

While working at Hosanna House, I found myself in a totally different work environment than the one I had come from in Technical Services. Since both BK and the majority of the programs at Hosanna House were church affiliated organizations, I started to become overly aware of my behavior. Not only because my mother worked on the third floor in the day-care center, but also due to the fact that so many people from church frequented the community center. When I worked with the guys at Pitt, I sometimes cursed more than a witch on Halloween, but at Hosanna House I had to watch my language—there were so many children around. I had to deal with being a role model, and when I found myself not living up to par, I was forced to deal with a guilty conscious.

Once a month, there were staff meetings held in a second floor conference room at Hosanna House, where all the directors and program coordinators who operated in the building met to give a brief overview of what happened during the past month and forecasted plans for the month ahead.

The meetings always began with very intense prayer.

Praying at work in a group setting was something totally foreign to me. It had always been my personal, secret time with God. But at Hosanna House, not only was there prayer time in the staff meetings, but also in the youth department where I worked. Because of this prayerful atmosphere, I felt forced to conduct myself as if I were in church.

Up until that point, I had set clear boundaries amongst the different areas of my life and always tried my best to keep them separate. There was church life, my life with friends, my life at work, and my life at home. Each of them had their own distinct personality, but as of late, it seemed as if my church life had begun to expand. It was growing and morphing and invading all the other areas. While at home, at work, with friends—and even at church—I began to sense the pervading presence of a pressure that not only desired to change who I was, but also wanted to turn me into someone I did not want to be.