This week, service began in earnest.
Monday marked the first day of my work with Corpus Christi Youth Centre, a YMCA-esque club in the Ballymurphy estate of West Belfast. All of us have been placed at various Youth Centres: Erica is with me, Will and Emma are at Holy Family, Mark and Meredith are at Saint Teresa’s, and Patrick is at All Saints. It’s looking at this point as though Corpus is one of, if not outright, the most economically hard-strung centre. Funding is a contentious issue for all of the clubs, as the government money set aside for youth work generally goes to more glamorous, nationwide campaigns themed around preventing suicide or underage drinking, rather than to the places that exist on a day-to-day level as a refuge for kids. Ballymurphy is one of the poorer estates in Belfast, which makes Corpus’ issues even greater.
Ballymurphy may be poor, but it isn’t unremarkable. The estate saw a disproportionately large amount of murder, bloodshed and conflict during The Troubles, due in large part to its heavily Republican/Catholic makeup. As one of the centre supervisors said during our induction, “The War was fought in West Belfast,” and few places got hit harder than Ballymurphy.
Another individual who works at Corpus, an ex-IRA volunteer named Liam Stone, told us (more on his story to come in the future) more about Ballymurphy. Kids associate their home with the colors black, white and gray, something that the staff has heard from them consistently over the years. However, when shown an overhead view of the estate—arcs of houses coexisting with liberal amounts of green—they identify the image of Ballymurphy as America. To get in and out of the area, they have to pass by an enormous British Army post, and its presence is a daily fact of the estate (since 1994, only one new building has been constructed in Ballymurphy: a British barracks). In areas of Ballymurphy, unemployment is as high as 70-80%, and of the 14,000 people that live there, over 50% are under the age of 25.
My experience with the Ballymurphy youth up to this point has illuminated these facts even further. The kids, when they find out that I’m from America, love to ask me, “America! Is it good?” a seemingly clumsy way of asking what the country’s like. The next question is inevitably which I like better: Belfast or America. Seeing as I’ve been in Belfast for all of two and a half weeks—and those two and a half weeks were proceeded by 19 years and seven months in America—it’s a pretty impossible query for me to answer. I’ll ask how they like Belfast, and the answers I get back are usually along the lines of, “It’s shite” or “It’s crap.” I try to challenge this perception, and I’ll frequently get begrudging acknowledgments of the city’s virtues, but the conversations do reflect the idea that these kids of all ages positively associate with the US and negatively associate with their home.
My responsibilities at the club are simple: be a good influence. There is almost zero structure as to my job, and I’m expected to play pool, play snooker, play table tennis, make arts and crafts, play soccer (football) and just hang out with the youth (in two sessions: the first, 4-7 pm, is with kids around the ages of 7-10 or 11, and the second, 7-10 pm, is with kids from 12-18). It’s exhausting; it’s rewarding; it’s fun; it’s awkward; it’s difficult; it’s informative; it’s great. It’s all the things working with kids often is. I’ve answered many questions about the US—where I’m from, our celebrities, the country’s best parts (Connecticut, of course), what we do for fun, and on and on and on…—and asked just as many about Ireland.
And in Ballymurphy, it is Ireland, not Northern Ireland or the UK. The centre has some distinct marks of a Republican/Catholic populace. Kids rock Celtic apparel quite frequently, many of the names are distinctively Irish in origin, the Union Jack is nowhere to be seen, and murals commemorating the IRA or calling out the Crown and the Ulster paramilitaries are sewn into the fabric of the streetfront. The people are Irish. One teenager of probably 13 or 14 clued me into the collective psyche best, without even realizing it; he was talking about how Belfast sucked, and how everything down south—in the Republic of Ireland proper, “where there are no Protestants”—was better. I don’t remember him saying that it was better because there were no Protestants, but he definitely made sure to mention that this absence of Protestants was the case in Ireland, and it certainly seemed to factor into his opinion of the two regions.
This being said, that was the only instance that I’ve seen all week that even approached sectarianism. Other than that, the kids are wildly accepting of others—hell, they’re accepting me with gusto—and often go out of their way to make each other feel comfortable. The older youths help the younger ones out and work hard to maintain the centre, doing chores and maintenance work when they otherwise could be out on their own. When a bunch of the guys were about to leave after working on the centre for a while one morning, they asked the Corpus’ head youth worker—a man who goes by the name of Bosley and who is both incredibly supportive and brutally hilarious—what they could come in and do the next day. He said he didn’t have any chores for them. They protested, until he came up with something they could come in and work on. I’d never seen anything like it.
The issues we need to deal with are some that American youth workers could certainly relate to, especially those dealing with the impoverished. Underage promiscuity is a serious one; Bosley informed me that 15% of those under the age of 16 have an STD, and girls as young as 12 and 13 are going around with 40-year old men. Horrifying stuff. I’m on the lookout for bracelets called shag-tags, which girls wear in certain colors, each color corresponding to a different sex act. If a boy goes up to them and breaks the bracelet, she needs to perform that sex act with the boy. Bosley pulled one off of a girl earlier in the week, and he told me how shag-tags are absolutely banned inside of the club—for good reason. There have also been some cases of children-to-children molestation taking place right outside of the centre, but for various reasons I won’t go into that in detail. Sex health and sex education are massive priorities for Corpus. Aside from that, there’s underage drinking and smoking as big concerns, as well as other drug use, and domestic abuse is another main problem. These kids are certainly facing more, and more serious, obstacles than I ever did growing up, and I’m going to do my best to try and help them around.
On a more upbeat note: it’s still early, but the opportunities here are going to be incredible. There’s the sheer experience of working with the kids, which has already proven to be revelationary, and there are the experiences I’ll be getting through the youth centre. This week, I’m taking a class with a bunch of the kids from 10-3 every day on Belfast Republicanism, and at night one of them is teaching a group—including me—to DJ. The kid’s good, and I’m excited. There could even be some Gaelic football in my future, although I don’t want to get too excited about that until I know more; that’ll help avoid me getting my heart broken. But we’ll see: our work—and our education—has only begun.
