H.O.M.E. Word – A blog from Project H.O.M.E.

Jordan Iman-Washington and Tynisha Reid

Jordan Iman-Washington and Tynisha Reid are two high school students active in the teen program at Project H.O.M.E.’s Honickman Learning Center and Comcast Technology Labs. Jordan has been attending the HLC-CTL since 2009. Tynisha is a 9th-grade student involved in the Culinary Arts Program.

On Thursday, May 5, 2011, Project H.O.M.E’s Honickman Learning Center and Comcast Technology Labs (HLC-CTL) held their annual Teen Program Showcase. This Showcase gives the teens a chance to reveal their talents and show them off to staff, peers, and parents. There are a variety of classes offered at the HLC-CTL, including acting, film, Junior Music Executive, mock trial, culinary arts, and digital connectors. Students from these various classes worked on personal or group projects and revealed them for the first time at the Showcase.

“The importance of the Showcase is to exhibit to the parents the students’ progress,” says Jeffery Bond, manage of the Teen Program at the HLC-CTL. “If we are to be successful in our mission in having the kids receive post-secondary education, we need to partner with the parents, and the Showcase is a great way to do so.”

While many students performed at last week’s Showcase, the one presentation that seemed to have sparked everyone’s interest was the acting class’s rendition of “The Dating Game.” Honickman Learning Center students KhaVaughn Love, Nicholas Molten, Tyreek Elum, Daquan Richardson, and Aisha Sisco performed the hilarious skit, along with class instructor Mr. Larry McKenna. The acting class, which is held every Tuesday from 4:00-6:00 p.m., wrote the original skit.

An additional highlight for the night was Chef Chiwishi’s culinary arts class. During the ten-week cooking course, the culinary arts class studied the history of Caribbean food. Students learned the recipes and spices used to make some of the Caribbean’s most famous dishes such as jerk chicken and limeade, which they served to all of the guests during the Showcase.

We invite everyone who came to our last Showcase to join us at our next one on June 8 from 6:00-8:00 p.m. at the Center. You are free to bring new guests to the Showcase. The theme of at our next Showcase is “SEED OF SUCCESS,” and each class will make a presentation that incorporates the theme of growing. The Honickman Learning Center and Comcast Technology Labs are located at 1935 N. Judson Street in Philadelphia.

Rosie Dillon is a Haverford House Fellow who works with Project H.O.M.E.’s Employment Services program. 

My mom was my home. She was my roots, my role model, my protector, my friend. She was the bearer of truly unconditional love in my life. When I lost my mom seven months ago, I was set adrift in the world with nothing to anchor me. I came back to work at Project H.O.M.E. because I didn’t know what else to do, and because I knew that my mom had been proud of the life I was embarking on.

At first, I just muddled through. Sometimes I cried in stairwells or bathrooms. Often I was numb. Then someone pointed out to me that if you cry at Project H.O.M.E., if you are having a rough day, if your gratitude at the Thanksgiving Day service is tempered by sorrow—people will understand, and you won’t be alone. Over time, I came to need my work, and not just for income or to fill my time.

We all know the rhetoric of recovery, but what I found was more than that.

Wendy Dillon, Rosie's mother, was captured in this newspaper photograph showing her fighting spirit.

A woman known to our community as “the maestro” played me Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, a song my mom had chosen for her memorial service. One woman told me: “I stopped drinking so that I would never have to go back to A.A. and hear all those people talk about how blessed they are.” Her irreverent sense of humor in hard times reminded me of my mom’s attitude toward her breast cancer support group, and really, toward life in general. My first trip to a hospital after my mom’s passing was to visit a Project H.O.M.E. resident. It was awful to be inside hospital walls and to see someone once full of life so diminished. But I remembered that she had found me crying in my office one day and comforted me. A woman about my age told me that the piece of myself that I lost will not be replaced, that the hole will never be filled. What a relief to know that I did not have to try to be healed.

Their resilience taught me, not that there would be an end to my sadness, but that there would be more to my life than sadness. The strength of others, starting with my mom, was the only proof I had that humans could survive and surpass terrible things. James Baldwin wrote: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.” The people that I met at Project H.O.M.E.—not just those who live there, but everyone—became my connection with all the people who had ever been alive and, by extension, had ever experienced heartbreak.

Of course, not all are equally put upon by pain. The inequalities of circumstance are obvious. It is easy to say that we cannot understand or share each others’ struggles, that our lives are just too different. This is why it is truly visionary to understand that, in Sister Mary’s words, “We can no longer pass by and piously say, ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ – but rather ‘There go I.’ ”

I found in this understanding a home that encompasses but transcends both my mother and the Project H.O.M.E. community. Because we are interconnected, the refuge that I have given and received and the human connections that I have made remain, no matter what tomorrow brings.