Email: Brittany Harvey

I am entering my seventh week in Seattle. The gray skies and constant drizzle have begun. All my roommates are beginning to get along—which is quite a feat considering I live in a house of six girls. I’m becoming very familiar with the King County Metro bus system. And while I like Seattle very much, it is my neighborhood of White Center—a low income, high crime, culturally diverse neighborhood south of Seattle proper—that I am falling in love with.

I spent my first weeks here in conversations with people at Mount View Presbyterian Church in White Center figuring out how I would spend my time in Seattle serving through the church. A couple weeks ago, the after school program that the church runs began, and I have been working there every day for the past two weeks. I absolutely love it. The program has about 30 kids from kindergarten to sixth grade.

I go over to the church at 3:00 to help set up the rooms and prepare the snack for the day. The kids get out of school at 3:45, and after snack and gathering time, we split into groups to do homework, journals, and reading time. I have the first grade boys—Zach and Thommas. Keeping them focused is a challenge. Zach is incredibly gifted, but lacking in social skills. Thommas is pretty much the opposite. But they are both great kids and I love the time I get to spend with them.

There was no school last Friday, so we took the kids on a day trip to Happy Times Farms (doesn't it sound like a magical place?). I had a group of six kids to take around to all the different attractions at the farm—a Ferris wheel, an inflatable castle, a giant mound of dirt, a corn maze, and lastly a pumpkin patch where the kids got to pick out one to take home. The day was crazy and exhausting and filled with brushing dirt off of kids’ sweatshirts and pants, pulling up kids’ jeans that were being pulled down by the weight of soaked pant legs, and wringing out kids’ socks soaked from falling off the inflatable toy into giant puddles.

The maze was a time of high stress. While Thommas, Robert, and Chance continually ran ahead of the group, I was trying to keep Seth—a kindergartener—moving through the maze instead of just walking into the corn stalks. I don’t know how you keep six kids together in a maze. I kept thinking, “If I lose these kids in here, how am I ever going to find them again?” Sure enough, Seth and I got far behind everyone else. We eventually made it out of the maze, as Seth figured out that staying on the path was actually much easier than walking into plants over twice his height. When we got out, the other kids were still in the maze. I decided I would wait a while before freaking out, and just as that grace period was coming to an end, I heard Thommas calling out my name. So I stood at the exit of the maze yelling out a roll call and eventually they found their way out. We were then able to go find a bathroom and head to the pumpkin patch.

I have been learning a lot in the past weeks about these kids, having responsibility over kids, living in an intentional community with five other young women, but mostly I’m learning a lot about myself—my views on low income communities, the church’s role in those communities, how I can take on more of a simple lifestyle, and most importantly, my relationship with God. It has been a challenging six weeks, but I am very grateful for them. I am being challenged in ways I never imagined, and I know I have only begun to encounter what all these challenges are.

Brittany Harvey

My blog site: www.britta-nica.blogspot.com