Eagle Butte Wednesday

Today we spent the morning doing actual work in the teen center which involved sorting incoming donations and writting down every last thing that was inside the boxes that we received. We then also filled orders for people who came needing supplies for their families like clothing, toiletries, diapers, etc.

It made me begin to wonder about the purpose of wellfare. Is it good or is it bad? It's hard to think of how giving people things that they need to survive could be a bad thing since it is done out of kindness, selflessness and charity, but it seems like Americans often become dependent on this wellfare and use it an an excuse to not work. I think it is safe to say that we are helping them in the short term for sure, since these families would be in a dire condition indeed if they didn't have food and clothing, but I think in addition to giving them essential tools for surviving in the short term, it is equally important for us to give them tools for surviving in the long term. Perhaps the Cheyenne River Youth Project should also spend time training the adults of the Cheyenne River Reservation so that they can get jobs, teaching the kids the importance of graduating high school and making it to college, and telling them at an incredibly early age about the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse.

This is why I really enjoyed our last activity of the evening, college night. We spent about an hour sharing information about college with the teens at the teen center. We talked about Rice and answered a variety of questions about how hard class work is, what kinds of sports we play, if we get to go on trips, and how many roommates we have. These all seemed like pretty standard questions to ask about college, but there were also some that surprised me. One kid asked how many Native Americans there were at Rice. It seemed like a really odd question to ask, but then I realized that these kids have been surrounded only by other American Indians for their entire lives and how scary it would be for them to travel to a different state and be surrounded by people with different skin and hair color that come from a different culture than you. I can't imagine how strange it would be for me to go to a school with no other Catholics, or no other white people. It would be really intimidating. While many of my friends come from different cultures and have different religious views than me, I still think that one needs to have other people like them that they can easily connect with on certain things.

Another tricky question that was asked was one about how often people drink at Rice. The quick and obvious response was yes, and they drink a lot. Rice is a very wet campus and everyone knows about it. Yet we all realized that we couldn't say this to kids in a community that struggles so much with alcohol abuse. I was afraid to answer the question, but David Younger had a great response. He explained that people do drink at college, because many of them are of legal age, but that it is a really foolish thing for them to do and many people aren't able to keep up with their school work when they drink too much. He explained how stupid it was for people to spend a lot of money on a college education and then waste it by getting drunk every night. I don't think I could have explained it better myself.