The Colors of Their Lives
by Vanessa Hooper
[Vanessa was a Pongo mentor and Assistant Project Leader in juvenile detention.]
The moments, in the chill of the cement walls of detention, have been the most powerful, heartbreaking, challenging, and inspiring moments of my life. I have been with Pongo Teen Writing for the last two years. Each Tuesday morning I felt a complexity of anxiousness and excitement wash over me. Unsure of how the voices in detention would color my life, I walked cautiously through the halls, aware of my own sound and energy.
With my Pongo colleagues, I waited patiently as the youth filed in, wondering how and what their days had brought to them. It was at those times I could feel the warmth and splattered paint their pain and passion conveyed against the cold colorless walls. Their words held the weight of the ocean and the lightness of a feather, full of regret and heartache, hope and courage, and confusion and enthusiasm for the future. There are painful stories that haunt me, leaving me dismal and disgusted by the malice and cruelty still breathing in this the world; while others leave me speechless from the undaunted vitality after years of trauma.
Two girls in particular, I was privileged to work with, left me paralyzed after hearing the harsh realities of their young lives. Both pregnant before fourteen, both raped more times than they could count, yet both smiled when we worked together as if they were royalty. “I was a kindergartener with dreams of being a stripper, and I know there are other girls like me,” said one girl, who grew up in the same town where I have my roots. Her poem was a letter to her son, a letter of truths and fear from a young mother who underestimated her own strength, a teenager who after homelessness, drug addiction, prostitution, rape, and abuse still believed in a dream of finding happiness. The other girl came into the Pongo world quietly, expressionless. She sat with poise and beauty, a pregnant twelve-year-old. Living in foster family after foster family, she had been ripped away from her siblings after her mother disappeared. As she began to open up through her poetry, her eyes grew wide with emotion. In contrast to the unthinkable acts she had endured, she held herself like a princess being groomed to be queen.
When I helped both girls create their poems, and as I read their words aloud, I could feel their confidence grow, and the colors of their lives shine. Each one left the room with a smile, as if she had begun to shed the cracked scales of a lost childhood. In a world of bars and barbed wire, with the sounds of echoing fears and the crescendo of doors slamming, where rock bottom feels ice-cold and isolated, there is a pulsating rhythm of hopefulness in the hearts of these youth, a thirst to be more than the label around their wrist and the file that confines them. Their eyes show the innocence of a child in a world where anything is possible, they just need someone to listen, someone like Pongo to see them for so much more than the mistakes in their past.