BECA Travels: Justice

Justice

There is a young man who is “supported” by United who is around the compound on most days.  He participates in the drama club, he helps out with various things.  For example, yesterday, Jordan was beginning to wash his clothes, and Justice came along and essentially did the wash for him. (Yes, the women in the group noticed this!) At various times on shoots, Collin has allowed Justice to wear our head phones and operate the audio equipment.  He seems to catch on quickly.

At 19, however, Justice has not learned to read.  It is not clear why he didn’t go to school, or what is happening in his family.  He rides a bike to HardtHaven each day and spends most of his day here. It was decided that Justice should learn to read, so one of the volunteers was working with him for an hour each morning on letters and sounds.  That volunteer left last week, so another person took over.  This morning, that person did not show up, so Justice came up to me as I was waiting my turn for a shower, and asked me to work with him.  One of the volunteers had prepared small squares of paper with a letter on each one – capital on one side, and lower-case on the other.  Some of the papers have letter combinations like “th” and “ing.”  I had no lesson plan, so I just started in.  We did simple words like “cat” and other letter combinations ending in “at,” and we spelled Justice’s first and last names.  We practiced simple words with “ing.”

What was exciting was how hungry Justice is to learn.  I’m left, though, wondering whether he speaks sufficient English to catch on to reading in that language, or whether synapses not connected at an early age are slowing him down, or whether there may be a learning disability.  One issue is, undoubtedly, that the variety of volunteers who are working with him have not laid out a clear progression of steps to reading.  But something doesn’t seem to be clicking.  I’m thinking of working with him to make a book with his words, so he can read those.  Maybe, then, others can build from that.