kartooner

The story below is part 2 of Work­ing for the County Part One, if you haven’t already done so — read the first part, trust me. Oth­er­wise, you’ll be so con­fused that you’ll be screaming.

The Kids

A cou­ple weeks ago I started the first part of the ‘Work­ing for the County’ story. It was an intro­duc­tion and left off at the kids who I would reg­u­larly (on sched­ule, on time) pick up from schools, homes, etc. These kids ranged from ages 13–20 years old because accord­ing to the pro­vi­sions by law a 20-year-old was con­sid­ered “respon­si­ble” enough to han­dle them­selves. This always per­plexed me con­sid­er­ing most of these 20-year-old adults were already mov­ing ahead in life (i.e. mar­riage and kids) and for the most part stayed within the ILSP pro­gram for the handouts.

Yet, I digress because I’m sure they were also there for the com­fort and for some­one to lis­ten to them. After all, they each had their own sto­ries to tell and I was to act as not only their dri­ver but their coun­selor as well. Most days this meant lend­ing an ear and casu­ally lis­ten to their stories.

For exam­ple, a girl who I’ll call Lisa who orig­i­nated from Mex­ico came to the United States with her mother. Not too long after the 14-year-old girl winds up preg­nant with her 25-year-old boyfriend’s baby. Through some per­sonal strug­gle of which Lisa would never fully reveal to me she winds up in a fos­ter pro­gram with her baby and her boyfriend upon hear­ing that she’s preg­nant flees the scene. Yes, it’s all and always will be very soap-opera.

Every Thurs­day I would pick up Lisa from her fos­ter care home (with baby of course) and I’d trans­port her to the class site, which in this case was in Hemet, Cal­i­for­nia. The drive usu­ally took any­where from 45 min­utes to an hour depend­ing on traf­fic which meant there was room for dis­cus­sion and a bit of language-gap edu­ca­tion. You see, Lisa only spoke very lit­tle Eng­lish (she did speak bet­ter Span­ish than I do so as I fig­ured we were even).

As you can imag­ine this would lead to inter­est­ing top­ics; world events, col­lege preper­a­tion, etc. I took this oppor­tu­nity to also learn some Span­ish and she always looked for­ward to it as well. As we would drive I would come up with the cra­zi­est state­ment I could think of and she would trans­late into her native tongue and then I would repeat. One day I came up with, “Her shoes are made of red candy and the sky is pur­ple and green.”, Lisa thought this was funny and I would of course fub­ble the trans­la­tion where it would sound more like “Pizza is made of thumbtacks.”

Lisa even­tu­ally relo­cated some­where else with Leslie, but I’ll always remem­ber her smile and her out­look on life. On her last day I asked her what she was plan­ning and she men­tioned that col­lege was in the hori­zon. She wanted to be a case worker and teach fos­ter chil­dren about her expe­ri­ences. This was a good thing con­sid­er­ing with Lisa I always men­tioned her goals should be high and that col­lege was impor­tant. I’m hop­ing that she’s study­ing hard at some Ivy League college.

Another stu­dent I would pick up who I’ll call Troy lived in a trailer park. His out­look on life (unlike Lisa) was more along the lines of what I thought was an alien instead of a 17-year-old boy. In class when I would set up the good­ies (which were com­prised of soda, chips, and some­times candy — yeah, we feed them healthy) he would approach me when I was pour­ing a drink and stick his fin­ger in the car­bon­ated fizz. He would then tell me that the oils in a “human’s skin melt the fizzzcha”… yeah, he would say ‘fizzzzcha’. After this, the Bill Nye lab assis­tant would share this bit of infor­ma­tion with the rest of the class. Inbe­tween teach­ing me about fizz and human skin oil, Troy would read his gamers guides in hopes of learn­ing how to evade the Dark Lord or learn how to col­lect the most coins.

Troy was an extra ter­res­trial — I’m for cer­tain of it.