A School Bus from Nowhere: Connecting with “at risk” kids requires crazy and crucial hope

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Maybe that’s not so surprising. They don’t have dads, remember. A man—even an old man—in a striped shirt gets their respect. I’ve taken more grief from the overindulged players and their parents at Lincoln High than from these unloved boys of the street.

Wondrous athletic ability and wildly chaotic basketball are on display here. One slender point guard dominated a game while taking no more than three shots, just with slashing drives and deft passes. On a break he tossed the ball hard off the backboard for a trailing teammate to jam it. This boy has a withered right arm like a thalidomide baby’s. He gets fouled a lot and makes nine of ten one-armed free throws. He understands the beauty of basketball played well, and it breaks your heart to see a kid so athletic and smart and to know he’s in trouble.

That boy’s team won the league championship. At the end of the game, we had a good 10 minutes of unrestrained joy before coaches could corral the players for a trophy presentation. Kids did cartwheels and back flips. They hung off the rims. Two of these bad boys—too heavy for standing back flips—went running at the wall and up it to launch their 360s.

I am emotionally disturbed. I have witnessed the abandoned young of our species at the acme, the very pinnacle, of their lives so far. I want them to know more of this teamwork business, of getting along. But you throw a shipwrecked kid a life rope and there has to be something more to haul him in to. Family. School. Church. A job, maybe? Basketball is not it, not in the long run.

On the morning after that final game’s pure loopy joy, I learned about a robbery in the art room, where the winners had dressed. One of the boys claimed to have lost $300.

Wait. What!? This kid had $300 in his wallet?

The ups and the downs of caring for these kids will turn you inside out, they are so extreme. But here’s upside news, that same morning: Dejarvis not only applied for but landed a job with Federal Express.

You never know.

Excerpted from Portland(Autumn 2008), a spiritual and civic-minded magazine published by the University of Portland, Oregon; www.up.edu/portland.

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