In the previous post, one of our volunteers, So-Heon Park, talked about her experiences with the Community Ministry program.
Without trying to paraphrase her, she said that one of the thing that she learned was that the children in the Kids Program led different lives from what she lived. And by extension, that all of us lead.
And that is one of the hardest things for Community Ministries volunteers to learn – that the kids in our program lead very different lives from what we have led, even those of us who come from very different cultures. And the problem isn’t that it is really a different culture, as much as it is a broken culture. Because there is a big difference between the traditional african-american culture with it’s emphasis on the family and the inner city black culture which features the family in the abstract but which is mostly about isolation and being taken advantage of. It is not a healthy culture and has very little to do with the traditional African American cultural values. But it is what most of the kids in our program live with on a daily basis.
We in the mainstream middle class world have a particular way of looking at things. We tend to think of this way as the ‘right’ way and that may very well be true. But that doesn’t mean that other people don’t think differently about things, or that they are necessarily wrong. But it is important for us to always remember that not everyone is exactly like us, and that God loves them just as much as he loves us.
Helping our kids find their way to a healthy culture is an important part of what we do in the Community Ministries program, and one that we hope you will keep in mind.
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