Director’s Desk: Issue One
There’s a saying in scripture that “if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you” (Matthew 17:20). I have found, though, that seeds of faith need two things: to be planted, and time to grow. This has been the story with Mustard Seed Mountain street newspaper.
In 2015, the concept of a street newspaper came like a seed that dropped right into my hands. It wasn’t until years later that I actually planted that seed in my heart. As facilitator of the House of Hagar Catholic Worker, my life and work are intertwined with those experiencing homelessness and poverty. Entering this work I quickly became aware that lives of the poor or homeless rarely make mainstream news. But when they do, there are often negative connotations attached. For fear of being regarded in only a negative light, and without their daily realities being represented, these folks often feel like second class citizens and disconnect from the news altogether. Here, a subculture exists, where “the word on the street” is more than just a catch phrase. It is the very way information about people and events is passed around the low/no-income community. While this can be an effective way to get information out, it can also be inefficient, inaccurate, unverifiable, or untimely.
There needed to be a more uniform way to disseminate information from a platform that truly represented the lives of the poor—the hard and the good times, current events; things relevant to them. We needed a newspaper that could also build bridges between people in diverse economic realities, to help us get to know and care about each other, and to bring us into community together.
Trauma from poverty is a real thing. A community with a high rate of poverty means a community crippled by trauma. Research shows that those who have Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, are already prone to poor physical and mental health outcomes as adults, before they even get to make one adult decision for themselves. This is important to understand when living in a state with the highest overdose rates in the nation. Those rates, in my world, are faces of people I dearly love—often young people, whose lives are filled with traumatic stories that make their drug use understandable. But by taking the only escape hatch they can find in the dark, they open a Pandora's box leading only into a momentary reprieve and the inescapable pain of addiction.
Amber, one of the gals who lived on our streets, was one such face, beautiful and funny, with the voice of an angel and witty as a whip. As much as she could make my heart soar with her voice, she could make my heart sink with the pain she carried—a heavy bag of hurt, and guilt for how she handled the hurt. I loved this girl dearly. I held her many times as she cried and cheered her on when she seemed ready to recover and heal. But something always kept Pandora's box propped open...until the day it killed her. And my heart broke.
Someone came running into my house yelling, “Amber is dead! Amber is dead! She overdosed and died. The police are there now!” My brain whirled in disbelief as I ran out of the house. This young, fierce, wild, graceful, winsome, talented, energetic life who pushed through day after day just couldn’t be squelched. Then, perhaps because of the many stairs leading up to the house, I saw it–her body–not securely strapped on a gurney, but clumsily carried down in a body bag. Anger welled up in me for all the dignity this girl had lost in her life and now in her death, robbed in poverty and robbed again by drugs. I wanted to scream from the top of my
lungs, “she can sing! Do you know how beautifully she can sing?!” Then, I saw my people with their phones out, recording her body being carried out in such an undignified manner. And I lost it.
Maybe it was years of pent up frustration of watching too many young people die, whose lives come and go like hers. Maybe it was all the injustices of poverty that wear on my soul. Or maybe it was that I wanted to scream at God, “not this one!” Looking at the people recording her body being toted in such a haphazard fashion, I yelled, crying, “stop it! You should know better! Can you show no respect?!”
For a brief moment the chaos stopped as they looked at me, startled. And then my heart heard it—this is what they have left to hold.
I immediately knew I was in the wrong. In their desperation, they were just trying to make sense of losing a life that was dear to them by documenting it. There would be no obituary in the newspaper, no service for those who knew her on the street. They would not have all the ceremonious steps that I and other more privileged people have to help us grieve.
Instead, a video would circulate amid texts, and they would whisper condolences as they passed on the street. They had no other path to acknowledge their pain over this God-given life that had just left our world. I wondered how many lives in our community are unknown or avoided, whose stories go untold in life and death because they are poor or homeless. In that moment, I realized I was still holding the seed which I had done absolutely nothing with. And right there on that sidewalk, in front of the house where an ambulance was carrying away a precious child of God, I shoved that seed for the Mustard Seed Mountain street newspaper deep into the crack of my broken heart and watered it with tears of grief and love.
The only thing that seemed to grow at first was impatience because there were barriers the size of a mountain that had to be moved. I needed the help of someone with skills in journalism that could guide me and train street journalists. And time passed. The crazy thing is, that when a seed starts to grow, it starts pushing up the dirt and subtly shifts the landscape. Before long, mountains start to move! That shift happened the day I mentioned my dream for a paper to Ella Jennings, an AmeriCorps volunteer finishing her term with Grow Ohio Valley. Ella, I learned, held a master’s degree in journalism, having just won the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award! She could see with her heart the need and the possibility of growing the community, and she was ready and excited to take on a new challenge as editor for Mustard Seed Mountain street newspaper. Soon we quickly found others who were interested and experienced, and just like that, a mountain went from here to there!
We are excited to present this first monthly issue and believe it’s just the beginning of what is possible. May this paper connect us together as people, all part of the human story, honoring the dignity of all the lives who pass through these pages to the ones reading it. I believe what will continue to grow is described in the mustard seed parable in Matthew 13:32: “though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches." A community with room for us all. Happy reading!