Field Trip

I'm almost two weeks into my summer internship at Centro Pedro Claver. Admittedly, until now, things have been rather slow. Mostly I've just been planning--the survey, the interviews, etc. Many hours logged at the office in anticipation of many more hours to be spent on site or in the editing suite.

Today, though, I got out of the office for a little guided tour of the vicinity. The neighborhood is actually EasternNorth Philly, an area with a heavy Latino representation and a very high rate of violence, the latter being the subject of the summer youth program and survey. I scoured an eight block radius with two members of the center, a young woman from a neighboring community, and an elderly Puerto Rican man who loves to brag that he's circled the world seventeen times. (He was a sailor for much of his youth.) We walked around the streets, past people sitting on stoops, kids running through fire hydrants, and the ice cream truck making rounds and making noise.

We spoke with perhaps a dozen different clusters of people and told them our plans for the summer. Most were wary of the three-man crew (which later grew to five as a couple of kids latched onto the march) especially the camera-toting girl with the not-so-local accent. I started to recognize the drug dealers really quickly as the ones who covered their faces with their hands, their shirts, or even the bodies of whoever was standing closest. While not everyone was friendly, most people were opinionated and shared incredible stories about violence they had either witnessed, or experienced in some way. Though today was just the beginning, I can tell it's going to be an interesting summer.