Imagine this. Your mother obsesses over drug dealing, cheaters. Your father is doing time for dealing drugs. Your mother goes to the club leaving you and your siblings to fend for yourselves. Your mother only shows up to ask for a loan. Thugs gun down friends and family every year. Maybe you've got a great family but don't know if there will be a roof over your head next week. This is life in the hood. Kids in the hood tend to stay there their entire lives. These innocent souls become the drug dealers and gang bangers of tomorrow. Who can blame them when it's all they've known? Can they break this cycle?
The hood
Every year churches in downtown North Little Rock bring these kids to Camp Caudle. It's a short drive from home and a totally different world. The Natural State hits you as soon as you leave the city limits. It's farm country, nothing but fields of green and gold. Arriving at the rustic camp grounds they press their faces against the windows. They step off the bus and hear no sounds of I-40, see no abandoned buildings, and feel no black top under their feet. It gets even better when they see the stars for the first time at night. They look forward to church camp like it was Christmas.
I love that they get the opportunity to leave it all behind for a week, but the real world is always ready for them when they get back. How can we help them face reality and overcome? We fight the spiritual battle every week. Side by side with adults and children in the craziest circumstances we strive to share the love of Christ in prayer and bible study and fellowship. I often wonder if we could do even more addressing the devastating lack of material needs and skills in our city.
The net
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Five years later his dream of a connected world became a reality in a big way. The sound of dial-up internet became the anthem of the 90s. Around this time a kid sits at a computer terminal. A blinking yellow cursor means endless possibilities at his finger tips. He runs qbasic and selects GORILLA.BAS. This is the moment he became a hacker. Somewhere out there an engineer at Microsoft wrote a silly little game with gorillas throwing bananas at each other. I found this game along with its source code buried in the freebies that came with Windows 95, and now, 20 years later, I write software for a living.
Better together
2019 is an incredible time to be alive. Technology is booming. Computers are cheap. It's easier to learn to code than ever. So why don't we see more success stories? Why do people still think it's not for them? Ironically the answer may lie in the astonishing commercial success of computers since the late 90s and the advent of the smart phone over a decade ago. Computers, phones, and gaming platforms come in nice packages with scary warnings about voiding warranties. I built my first desktop computer before I was 10 years old. Many kids today only know computers as thin slabs with a touchscreen glued to the front. User interfaces are incredible today. Companies invest massive capital maximizing our attention to their games and social media platforms. They deliver the smoothest experiences designed to make us forget the machine and focus only on the content. When I learned to code in the 90s, I never forgot I was using a computer because they were slow, clunky and uuugly.
Kids today need something different. When I talk to them about a future career in tech, they have vague notions of creating new games or even just playing video games for money. The deck is especially stacked against kids in the hood. This could be a way out. Imagine that kid who doesn't know where she'll be living next week. She has no vision for her life outside surviving the streets of her neighborhood. But she's still a kid. She has her whole life ahead of her. She's smart and does well in school. Maybe she's a lot like that nerdy kid hacking on the gorilla game in the 90s. She'll never discover this for herself unless someone gives her a computer and lots of encouragement.
This isn't just about one kid, or even a classroom. It starts with that one child who takes off, breaks out of the toxic cycle, and grows up to be a role model. This is about sparking a tech revolution in the hood.
Do you want to be a part of this child's story? You can. Every summer we host a tutoring program at Silver City Church to help inner city youth stay sharp on reading and math. This year we want to kick it into high gear with a technology lab. We plan to purchase 5 build-your-own computer kits from Kano, which they call the STEAM Pack. If we get these kits I believe we can bring back the hacker mindset of decades past and kick start the careers of software developers and entrepreneurs of decades to come.
Let's take a small step to break the cycle today.
If you'd like to know more, please reach out to me on Twitter @pingortle or shoot an email at kaleb.lape@gmail.com.