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News Archive >> A Mentor's First Experience
A Mentor's First Experience
- A Mentor’s First Experience
By Elizabeth Werness
It was the first community meeting of the year at Yerba Buena High School, and the white name tag around my neck, designating me as an adult mentor, might as well have been a scarlet letter. A few youth humored me by answering my questions about friends, classes, and quinceanera parties, but soon ducked out of these stilted exchanges to return to chattering with their friends in Spanish, a language I'd studied in school but never really learned to understand. The youth were forbidden to display gang colors openly, but every time someone surreptitiously lifted a black sweatshirt to reveal a red or blue jersey underneath, I was reminded that their lives outside this gym revolved around a calculus of complicated loyalties I couldn't even begin to comprehend.
Once everyone had arrived, the CCPY leaders announced their chosen icebreaker activity: We were to form teams of eight—six youth, two mentors—and build a tower ten stories high. No glue, tape, or structural supports would be permitted; used index cards and printer paper would be the only materials provided. We wouldn't even be allowed to talk to one another as we worked. Privately, I thought the leaders couldn't have laid a better groundwork for failure if they'd tried, and just as I'd predicted, things fell apart from the beginning. Our team splintered into warring sub-sects; when two girls started building an elaborate pyramidal house of index cards, one of the boys knocked it down.
But as the time allotted to complete the task dwindled, something unforeseen began to happen: we all started to pay attention to what others in the group were doing and to look for ways to help. Noticing that one youth had developed an ace construction technique—folding one index card into a sturdy four-sided base, then placing another card on top as a platform—others rushed to imitate his design so that all ten stories could be stacked more quickly. Once we'd laid the last quivering platform, all of us, youth and mentors alike, clustered protectively around our creation, determined not to let it fall. The year has barely begun, and we still have much to learn about one another, but I hope—despite the many factors, linguistic, social, and otherwise, that separate us—we will be able to follow up on what we accomplished that day: working together to create something bigger than any of us could have managed alone.
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