the unifier

A few times per month, or whenever I can, I venture down to volunteer at the unassuming storefront that is The Boring Store and its hidden 826CHI. (Pause for me to get out my journalistic writing style:) Founded in the Bay Area by the brilliant (my own editorializing) contemporary writer Dave Eggers, 826 exposes children of a variety of ages and skill levels to a variety of different styles of writing through free field trips, in-class visits, and workshops at nights and on weekends. It encourages excitement about literacy through these programs, along with its free tutoring program, in a creative and non-academic atmosphere. In short, it's amazing.

(Pause for me to ditch the fact-laden journalistic writing style in favor of something more descriptive:) Its sign is a confusing mix of words and sentences that do not amount to any understanding whatsoever of the organization inside. In the window is an uninteresting collection of brown boxes and some question marks. The first time I walked by I thought it was a box store, lacking any better explanation for the windows that stand adjacent to a row of old-fashioned furniture store neighbors with wrought-iron security gates. In the store is a random and creative assortment of supplies for spies, each displayed with its own personal brown box. Every aspect of this place is meticulously thought-out, from the mannequins equipped with black spy mustaches to the one-way mirror into the store from the classroom. And kids go wild upon entering. Even I, an adult (who admittedly retains some childlike impulses), like the brightly colored floor and the 50-something spy cameras that point toward the front door and the old-fashioned cash register.

Last week, on my once-a-month day off, I got up early and made my way to 826 as I often do for a field trip with a first grade class from the South Side. Without going into too much detail about the experience, the class goes on a field trip to 826, which, we tell them, turns into a publishing house during the day with a very mean and mysterious boss named Moody. A volunteer teachers the kids about what goes into a story, the class creates the beginning of an often very strange original story which is illustrated by another volunteer (once a second- or third-grade class wrote about a trilobite festival, creatures I had never before even heard of) and each student is directed to finish the half-finished story and create illustrations.

This is all beside my main point in writing about 826, which I am finally getting to. In this class of first-graders from the South Side, there was not one white student. There were maybe two Hispanic students, but the rest of the twenty-something kids in the class were black. The teacher was young and white. All of the volunteers and the full-time staff at 826 were white (and the majority young and female).

In the confines of the store, and even in the real world, none of this really matters, of course. Any kid, any class, regardless of location of the school in Chicago's rather strictly segregated North, South, and West Sides, regardless of parents' income and anything else, obviously gets the same program and the same number of volunteers, and the same professional-looking bound and "published" books at the end of the field trip. But the reason I bring it up, I guess, is to illustrate Chicago's persistent problem with gentrification and segregation based, unfortunately, on income and race. I don't know exactly what kind of area this school is located in or anything about the home-life of the children. I won't venture any explanations or solutions, as growing up in SoCal, diversity outside of white or Hispanic or Asian isn't really my specialty.

I will, however, keep volunteering.