Detroit Report for Upcoming IICD Newletter

January Belize Team: Recollections from Detroit

Detroit is a beautiful city with a rough exterior which has been battered by the cataclysm of outsourcing. It is a large city in which only a third of it is inhabited, leaving a look of devastation and tragedy as if recently it was shattered by war. In this setting January Belize Team(JBT) went to Detroit for an action period near the end of February. The experience was great in so many ways: working with IICD Detroit, staying in a Detroit home built by the Young Detroit Builders(YDB) and just being able to stay in this historic city.

The reason we had this “action week” was to work with IICD’s clothes collection. This consisted of working with IICD Detroit for 3 days, our Detroit comrades run the clothes collection warehouse. JBT worked alongside the workers collecting clothes in Detroit and the surrounding cities, organizing and distributing books to local groups and schools, and driving around Detroit handing out the IICD newsletter to business owners who host our clothes bins.

On the first night we arrived JBT was lucky enough to go to the Detroit Pistons game(basketball) the first night. We were able to thanks to Roland a YDB Director who gave us tickets and then left. It was a lot of fun but Detroit lost. The stadium was mostly empty and probably only a third full, I couldn’t help but think of the parallel of the population between the fans in the stadium and of people in Detroit. For some comedy relief it’s worth noting that an old married couple from Detroit renewed their vows during half-time with all 20 of their children with them, unfortunately their 250 grandchildren could not all fit on the stadium floor, literally. Condom anyone?

Hyun Jung, Sunny J and I all went out separately at least one day and collected clothes. This is quite a job because there are around 300 clothes bins in Detroit. Of course we didn’t go to everyone everyday but went to around 25 locations, this takes nearly 8hrs. This is a good experience for the Poverty Fighters and Development Instructors in Dowagiac for many reasons, in fact about a third of the budget for the school comes from clothes collection. This is why it is so important to extend our hands in solidarity and action from Dowagiac to Detroit. If it wasn’t for those in Detroit we would not be in Dowagiac, therefore we couldn’t go to the projects in third world countries to develop the community. To me it’s very important that the volunteers of IICD really appreciate and understand the work of our clothes collection, in the future it would be nice to have the workers in Detroit see what we do in Dowagiac because the preceding sentence is also true for them.

On another day, two days for me, Hyun Jung and I went to clothes bin hosts and gave the store owners the IICD newsletter. This is a good action to show our appreciation to the hosts. We also took that time to address the hosts needs and ask if they had any grievances with the clothes bins. For the most part they were indifferent to me but still many were happy and appreciative for the visit. In this way IICD builds a better rapport with the hosts and lets them know that because of them it helps send JBT and other teams to fight poverty in Latin America and Africa, and that IICD is attentive to the clothes bin. I also thought of this time as an investigation while driving around Detroit. One of the most interesting finds throughout the trip was the ethnicity of the people I saw strolling around and the ethnicity of the business owners(hosts). I would say 95% of the people I saw walking around were of Afro-American decent. Yet I would say 5% of the businesses were owned by Euro-Americans and 95% owned by immigrants from Arabic countries (I went to nearly 60 host businesses). This was particularly interesting for me and I wondered where does the black community work? How is this possible? Those will be good questions for a future article.

Andra the whole time, with the help of Sunny J on one day worked with donated books. They organized the books from big cardboard bins, with special attention to the mass amounts of donated encyclopedias IICD had. Andra then got in contact with many different organizations and the local library. The Library took all the encyclopedia’s and they brought the rest of the books to a literacy program for children, also to a non-profit that does adoption and development disability services for children, and the last was a federally funded pre-school for low income families. In Detroit “book aid” like this is desperately needed in these community groups, schools, and individual homes, I hope to see future IICD action weeks follow our footsteps in this regard, Andra did a great job.

Our accommodation in Detroit was an amazing experience. The Young Detroit Builders let us stay in one of the number of houses they have renovated. When Gil a YDB leader brought us to the house I was very intimidated. The house was surrounded by a raggedy looking fence with a lock. One of the first things Gil told us was something of the fashion of ‘be careful this is a bad neighborhood, and the house hasn’t been broken into in nearly a year, so you should be fine.’ Needless to say this didn’t help my anxiety. The windows of the house were boarded up with square particle board on the outside and a 2x4 on the inside which was used to secure the particle board. The inside was very nice and there was one couch and one microwave and that was it and that was more then enough for our team. The area seemed to be populated, with probably about a fourth of the houses vacant, in my experiences in Detroit this ratio is actually not bad. After a few days my anxiety went away and honestly I felt there was no reason to have fear as that distorts your reality of the situation, I was starting to settle in but by then we only had two nights left. Also it needs to be said that the youth of YDB renovated the house themselves and did an amazing job. YDB trains inner-city youths to get their GEDs and to learn vocational skills at the same time. Their program is very empowering and the only problem is that it’s needed a thousand fold more in Detroit and hopefully as they grow that will become a reality.

Also during this time in Detroit Hyun Jung became ill. So Sunny and I took her to the emergency room. This was quite an experience as well, the hospital sees anyone who comes in, and the deal is they bill you later. We were recommended this by one of the warehouse IICD workers, he said that if you ask anyone from Detroit where they go it’s the Triage. This simply is because you don’t have to pay immediately or give them some form of insurance, and the fact is he said many Detroiters don’t ever pay once they receive the bill. They had nice facilities and supposedly some of the best doctors so I’m inclined to believe the state of Michigan makes sure their compensated.

The Detroit action weekend was surely a valuable experience for our team. Although some us (including me) weren’t sure if it was the best thing to do with the little time we had, we ended up concluding afterwards as a team that it was very important. I personally feel that it’s an obligation of every team to have this action weekend and to understand why we do them; for solidarity with IICD Detroit and for understanding of why and how we are able to live in our beautiful school and go to our projects. Without this knowledge and these experiences from Detroit I would have missed a very important aspect of IICD and my comprehension of the workings of IICD would have only been half full.