Recruiting in Prichard, AL

This is a picture of our intern team this summer. We come from all over the country and even have a Canadian. We range from 20 years old to 37, with a wealth of life experiences and academic training.




Downtown Mobile, Alabama is nestled on Mobile Bay on the Gulf Coast. A seemly small city in which cruise ships begin their exotic vacations to the Bahamas, the Caribbean and Mexico and home to the United States' original Mardi Gra celebration. While I began to explore Mobile as a tourist, enjoying the beautiful beaches of Dauphin Island and the best shrimp I have ever eaten, the Mobile I work in is a different place. A place where the isolation of rural living seems to meld with the crowding of congested urban living. Neighborhoods that have been sliced in half and bound by highways, physically separating the poorest neighborhoods from the middle and upper classes of Mobile.

Prichard, a town bordering Mobile, is the first place I recruited, and home to some of the poorest and most violent government housing developments in the state. To make matters worst, it is now bankrupt, which has caused police to loose their pensions and thus, their incentive to protect and actively patrol the neighborhoods. Residents are lucky to be employed in this town, and those who are, usually live in the safer neighborhoods in Mobile. The "downtown" is two blocks of gated and barred pawn shops, bars, barber shops, convenient stores and furniture stores, with an equal amount of vacant store fronts. There is not a tree that lines the streets in downtown, and dust and liter consume everything. Street signs are almost nonexistent, house numbers bounce around in no particular order, and many are drawn on to houses. The isolation is felt everywhere... streets are circular and randomly change into other streets. Houses are very spread-out, consumed by over growth and have burned junk piles surrounding them. Many houses are boarded up, with broken windows and some plots only hold the foundation of a house with a staircase leading to nothing. We later found that many of these houses were burned to the ground by landlords to avoid increased property taxes that were instituted after bankruptcy was declared. Landlords could claim arson, which is the most common crime in these areas, and receive insurance money, while avoiding paying taxes on their houses.

After a week of intensive training, my partner and I were sent into Prichard to recruit in neighborhood known as Snug Harbor because it is pressed against the interstate highway. My partner Jayrrd's aunt knows the police chief in Mobile and when she heard we were working in this area became very concerned. When the police chief of Prichard was alerted to our presence, he said that he does not even send his cops into Snug Harbor because it is too dangerous and isolated. So there we were, on foot, winding down unmarked roads, more than a mile from our car. Occasionally, a street sign would still be intact and we could reorient ourselves on our map. We were sent to Sung to recruit young people that had taken the survey in the past years to take the survey again at the Head Start located in the neighborhood.

Jayrrd and I did not see a single person for about 10 minutes when we started recruiting on Memorial Day. We felt so uneasy and already exhausted from the 98 degree weather. At the first home we stopped at, an elderly woman answered the door. She immediately invited us in and asked us what we were doing running around such a dangerous place for. We told her we were looking for three girls that claimed her address as their own the last time they took the survey and she said they were her granddaughters but they were not home. She offered us water after laughing at how sweaty I was and had us sit in front of her air-conditioner. We ended up staying with her for almost an hour chatting about her family, looking at photo albums and family pictures, hearing about which children belonged to which family member. We finally said we had to go and that we would return to see if the girls were back to sign them up. Before we left, she took a picture of us on her granddaughter's digital camera. My feelings of uneasiness and dread transformed into feelings of gratitude. I could not believe this woman's kindness and openness with us. She sent us on our way with a warning to be careful, and our epic day of recruiting began.

Our day continued with few people home; their were some vacant houses, a couple family BBQs and another elderly man that invited us into his home and offered us water. He too was a chatter and we called his daughter to see if his grandson wanted to take the survey this year. Again, he sent us on our way with a warning about the neighborhood. We then had to knock on one of the worst houses I have ever seen. It appeared vacant but the air-conditioner in the window was a dead give away that people still occupied the dilapidated structure. The front was so over grown, we decided to go to the back where a car was parked. There was another house on the same plot in even worst shape that appeared abandoned. No one answered, so we returned the next day. When we returned, we found a run-down looking man who was the father of the kids we were looking for. He banged on the windows and yelled at them to come to the door. A 15 year old answered it and said her sister and her would take it but there brother was gone. We were trained to figure-out what "gone" meant by asking when the brother would return. She responded in a quiet voice, devoid of emotion, "He ain't comin' back mam. He got shot and killed this last year." Jayrrd and I were speechless for what felt like eternity. I broke the silence by saying I was sorry for her family's loss... nothing else came to me. We left and on the tracking sheet for the family put the "failure code" number the represented "deceased", a number the represented the horrible tragedy that this family had endured. He was 17 years old. That was the moment the reality of violence in which these kids grow-up with everyday hit me. And when the girl and her sister came to take the survey later in the week, all I could think about was that they should have been walking to the survey with their older brother.

The culture of beating children as a form of punishment was also introduced to me in Prichard. When we returned to the old ladies house, we met her granddaughter and her baby cousins. The granddaughter babysat her cousins during the summer and the three year old stepped on my bag by accident. The granddaughter started yelling at the toddler, telling her to apologize. When she did not say anything to me, the granddaughter threatened to beat her and got a ruler. I quickly said it was fine and that she didn't mean to, trying to diffuse the situation. She did not hit her in front of us because the toddler ran to the old lady as the granddaughter came toward her with the ruler. Many kids since then have openly told me that their mamas' would beat them for doing something wrong and we saw the old marks to prove it. Corporal punishment is almost nonexistent in my world or if it happens, it is seen as an inappropriate and harmful way to discipline a child. But this is not the reality in these neighborhoods. Respect is literally beaten into many of the children we have surveyed.

And so our first week in the field ended with Jarryd and I knowing Prichard like the back of our hand. We surveyed about 120 kids at the Head Start in Snug Harbor and conducted three in-home surveys for kids that could not make it to the site because they were on the other side of the highway.