Love - Patch's Skateboard Blogger Recalls Finding It In An Unlikely Place

I need a break! I have been filling my head with urban development, symbolism, bio power and other seemingly random/arduous academic writings for my thesis. I decided to go back and analyze the journals from my trip longboarding across America for the Boys & Girls clubs to re-inspire my work.

I have forgotten why I have started this thesis in the first place. Here is something out of my journal after longboarding too El Paso Texas. These are some of the kids I met along the way that changed my life. I hope you are fortunate enough tomeet people like this, and if you have I would love to hear about it over some coffee or tea.

May, 30, 2009 - El Paso, TX

El Paso is such an interesting city with a  vibrant community, but I think they have to be that way because it seems like the government turned away from this part of America. The city sidewalks are broken up and sticking out of the ground, which is great for skateboarding but bad for pedestrians. One thing that is cool though, everyone is bilingual here - all the kids are anyway. As we skated into the area, there was gang graffiti and messed up sidewalks, but there were a lot of people out and about meeting with each other.That was really amazing. I really liked to see community in action. Even though we were still in America it felt sort of like being in another country. Then all of sudden, there’d be a McDonald’s. You could put a McDonald’s in the most racially, ethnically different place in the world, but when you go inside, they are exactly the same, anywhere you go. 

Right next to El Paso sits Juarez, Mexico which is a war zone. Several of the kids have family members die every other week or so. When we came into the city, a lot of the kids had to be asked to stop throwing up gang signs. So many of them identified with the gangs and had family in them. A lot of the kids had never been out of that part of El Paso. They had never really been anywhere except across the border to Juarez and back. That was their world.

While we were talking to the kids, the drug cartels lit a couple buildings on fire across the border. They demanded that every day the Police Commissioner didn’t resign, they would shoot a cop. We were there for three days. On the fourth day the commissioner resigned and there were four dead bodies in the road, all police officers. I was told that 2,000 people had died the year before in Juarez and a lot of these gang members come back and forth from Mexico all the time and the kids see it. They are so desensitized to it. El Paso really taught me about America as a whole. The news is constantly showing us these videos of other countries in dire need of help and there are people dying overseas. These are very valid concerns and issues worth fighting for, but El Paso is just forgotten. Everyone’s taking about Haiti and wearing bracelets for AIDS victims in Africa, which are important issues to be aware of, but they seem like such fashionable and trendy concerns. It seems like many focus on other countries because it makes them feel cool. It takes more than wearing bracelets and talking about world problems in your local starbucks the work that really needs to be done isn’t fashionable or trendy.

It was shocking to hear a couple of the kids we meet had seen someone get decapitated, by the age of 12. That’s more than I could handle at 25 and more than anyone should ever have to see in their life time

In the midst of everything there was a young boy who took an interest in us. His name was Alejandro. The moment we skated to his club he followed us around showing us the local skatepark and playing basketball. When the news came to interview me, he wouldn’t leave my side. He took lots of pictures and rode my deck with me all afternoon. We were running a skate competition, because they had a pretty sick little skate park there, which is a testament to skateboarding, because it really doesn’t take much to make a really good skatepark if the designer knows what he/she is doing. They’re not that expensive.

All the kids from the area came in for the skate competition and we gave away some shirts and wheels and decks from Sector 9. We gave away so many stickers and shirts and wheels to those kids. I trusted them with our decks and cameras. For a group of kids who didn’t have much and are surrounded by gangs and drugs, Alejandro made sure nothing was taken from us that we needed on the trip. It made me smile watching him take inventory before we went in for “tacos y burritos!”

While I speaking I saw the giant billows of smoke in the background and I asked Alejandro, “what is that?” He told me that the drug cartels were lighting buildings on fire. If that happened where I’m from, everybody would be freaking out. Everyone would be losing their minds, But Alejandro was so nonchalant about it. That took me back, I was so confused that this was just a regular occurrence for these kids. It was just another thing happening. Between the cops being killed and drug mules coming over the border, it blows my mind how these kids make it. Alejandro told me “it’s okay, we are safe here.” In El Paso the kids feel safe in their clubs. It was like he thought there was some sort of force field around it. Maybe there was and I just couldn’t see it.

After talking with the kids outside, a group of young kids led us into kitchen inside the club. It felt spiritual, everyone was sitting around smiling, feeding each other tacos and laughing. The love in the room was familiar, but I had not seen it in years. It felt like the first time I took communion while I was camping. I haven’t taken communion for years. When I was a teenager, my parents separated. During a church service, a leader at my church approached me and said communion was for those who didn’t have “sin“ in their lives; he said I shouldn’t take communion until our family was better.

My family never got better.

I carried those feelings of shame on my back sense that day. That guy may have been a dick head, but to this day, I still have not taken communion. I remember thinking that I could never be like the kids with “good” families that took communion. I remember this as the first time I felt marginalized by a group that (at that time) I wanted to belong to. I felt ashamed and embarrassed. I felt less than what God made me to be. I felt unworthy to participate in this act of love and acceptance with the rest of my  community.

From then on in my church, I felt like God’s bastard son, like I was inadequate, unacceptable and hopelessly flawed. So I acted accordingly. For years, I haven’t been taking communion at church or anywhere else, not since I was 14 years old. The act itself is a beautiful gesture. Everyone comes together and remembers how amazing Jesus is. The community congregates and reflects on the amazing gift we are given (the gift being Jesus). It’s a time of remembrance and a time to love each other, a time of community and unity underneath one God. I have yet to feel the acceptance of community when it came to communion; I have only flashbacks of shame and weakness.

I carried this sense of worthlessness, of not being accepted by those who I wanted to be known by or to be a part of for almost half my life. Until the day I skateboarded into El Paso, Texas. While in El Paso. I met the best ambassadors for God – the youth of El Paso to be specific.

The BGC in El Paso, to be honest, was rundown and the kids were surrounded by violence. We gave them stickers, t-shirts and let them ride our skateboards all day. After the speaking and games were all over, the kids took us back to their kitchen. It was something important to them, a treasure that they prized. Eating everyday isn’t a luxury these kids had, and instead of hording it to themselves they desperately wanted to share with me.  

These kids had access to something so valuable to them and they didn’t just share it with me, but they wanted to give the food they had to everyone around them. There were no rules for who could and couldn’t eat the authentic tacos. They didn’t exclude anyone;. They didn’t do this for any other reason but love. The pure love in those kids was like the love I once understood from Jesus, how he wanted us to remember him, to love and value each other and act as a community. I ate those tacos not like any other taco, but I ate them like I was taking communion. Participating in a blessed and beautiful act while surrounded by a community whose love for God and community was breathtaking.

A majority of the time, as a white dude, we tend to think our models and structures can be taken to other areas and will work just as well there. The spread of Democracy if you will, we take these models that work in our neighborhoods and expect them to work anywhere. The neighborhood I’m from in Tacoma — Hilltop —isn’t the nicest place in the world, but the problems are so different because they are different people with different economic issues. You can’t take a model that works in New Hampshire or New York and bring it into another city and expect people to live the way you live. They are completely different communities with unique gifts and talents that are used differently than in San Diego, Santa Cruz or Tacoma

The things these kids in El Paso were seeing everyday were not things that kids in Gig Harbor would ever dream about. The closest they’d ever come near to El Paso would be on a late night cable TV show. So kudos to Art, because he’s killing it, He is in the middle of chaos and is able to make a safe place for kids who are confronted with  violence every day.

I felt so drained when we left El Paso. So often we enter things with such good intentions, thinking we’re going to make such a difference and be a catalyst for change. Then you get a good dose of reality and see how people really live. It humbles you and makes you realize how those how have the least are the most willing to give. 

(Click on the media gallery to view a YouTube video of the trip)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn_O1JglTVs&feature=player_embedded