City Mice

Boing Boing has a mention of an organization that takes inner-city kids on trips to rural areas, the Fresh Air Fund.

Their charter is basically to arrange to send low-income New York City kids out of the city for the summer to get a breath of fresh air and experience the country: free summer vacations for kids who might never have left the city in their lives.

What I would like to know is, where is its counterpart: a program to take coddled suburban kids for a stint in the city? In New York, I was fascinated watching the kids on the street; multiracial bunches, shouting and laughing in Spanglish, running down the sidewalk to buy shaved ice after school. Crossing busy streets, hopping onto trains with the quickest glance at the schedule. Utterly undisturbed by Unpleasant Odors, or People Who Look Different Than Me.

Certainly, impoverished kids--in any environment--can lack experiences that middle-income children take for granted. But the accusatory name, "The Fresh Air Fund", is a relic of the Victorian era of its creation (1877), whose moral leaders adhered to a simplistic "city/public bad, country/domestic good" dichotomy. This questionable world-view has been woven into the very fabric of our society, into the sprawling mini-manor houses of our suburbs, in air-tight zoning regulations which strictly separate the commercial from the residential and treat density like plague.

The very term "inner-city kid" is enough to garner pained looks from most members of my mother's generation. Yet I saw kids bathed in the sights and sounds and smells of all cultures, all income levels; the stunning diversity of human experience. Brushing the city's dirt off their hands to share a churro, their laughter rising over cab horns and passing trains. Kids scrambling down subway stairs at rush-hour, confident and content in a crowd of strangers. I looked at them and thought, this. I would give this to my children.