An eventful three hours….

When i wrote my "first official post" i said that i wouldn't be typing such a long essay in the near future... so here is the next essay 5 months later and i think it's even longer than the first one..

Had to go to work half an hour early last week… it was going to be an interesting three hours…… In the area where I work there are two other youth clubs at different community centres, to bring the areas together (and to save costs!) there’s going to be an area youth coordinator, who is going to oversee all three clubs. The candidates were going to be interviewed that day, and they were going to spend 15 mins around the club. Some genius somewhere had forgotten that we start at 7.30 and had scheduled the first interviewee to come at 7.00 therefore we had to start early, also as the coordinator will be working with all three clubs we had some of the staff and kids from the other clubs. Here’s the interesting bit… pretty much all of the children from the other clubs are white….pretty much all the kids from our club are asian (and very badly behaved!), for no reason other than the fact that the other two clubs are placed in a highly populated white area and ours is in a highly populated asian area. So the evening began quite well with only a few children and one member of staff from each of the other two clubs, the children were delightful, they asked politely to go on the computers/play pool/table football, and then our children came…….
We were holding our breaths….at first it was ok….
One of the boys asked me “who are these mongs anyway??” (Which was actually polite, we were expecting a continuous stream of foul language directed at them, however this was ok, we could deal with this).
My response “don’t call them mongs, they’re not mongs, they’re from the *community centre name* and the *community centre name*” (I realised after the words tumbled forth from my mouth that I shouldn’t have repeated the offending word twice!) which was met with “why are they here?” I then proceeded to explain.
I was quite happy multitasking, I had to do the register, collect the fees, as well as manning the door and keeping an eye on the kids upstairs (our supervisor was showing the interviewees around, my colleague was keeping an eye on things downstairs, our other co-worker wasn’t in that week, and the staff from the other clubs were content with dealing with their children (3 from each club!)
Now we were being quite selective with whom we were letting in, some of the more unpredictable mischief makers/gang leaders were told they weren’t allowed in this week….that’s when it all went down hill. They began throwing stones at the upstairs windows, started swearing, they even resorted to the old “oh so you let the white kids in but not us”, they then climbed the outside stairs to the fire exit and stood on the banister thingy (which is on the first floor, so if they fall they land on the pavement, with not so pleasant results) and started banging it and kicking it, to the dismay of the two staff and children from the other clubs:
Me: (looking at the window in a fed up manner when the first stone was thrown, rolling my eyes and inhaling deeply)
Staff member from the other club: (jumping out of her skin, then looking at my reaction) “oh so that’s normal issit”?
Me: (pondering whether or not to tell her that it is indeed very normal, at the risk of making our kids sound like hooligans) well...yeh they’ve done it a few times before…
Staff member from the other club: (shaking her head wildly) Ohhh I don’t know how you cope me, I just don’t
Me: (give her a martyresque smile and proceeded to tell the kids to get away from the windows, whose immediate reaction was to jump up on the chairs to get a better look of the action).
Because the offenders were outside we couldn’t really do anything, but ignoring them is so frustrating, particularly when you have the shocked and appalled faces of your “guests” looking at you… almost imploring you to do something to put them out of their misery. It annoyed me that we couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t help feel that they thought we were incompetent…. As the kids were very persistent we ended up calling the police, but alas the enemy had a spy from within…one of the cheeky buggers who were inside the club had warned the cheeky buggers outside the club that security were on their way, by the time security got here there were no cheeky buggers left outside….
Things proceeded quite chaotically for a little while as children kept coming in and out, as we didn’t have tuck shop they were taking trips to Asda across the road to buy their supplies. We had a new door fitted in, which only opens from the inside and has to be turned to be unlocked then you have to press the button to release it….in other words a staff member has to open it, sometimes this was me sometimes this was my colleague downstairs (the door was downstairs) either way it involved going down the stairs to check if someone else had opened it, or to open it myself.
Then our supervisor came upstairs in between showing interviewees around and proceeded to give me an account of how she opened the door on her way up only to be confronted by a very tall youth, who left her gob smacked after letting out a volley of abuse, she told him not to speak to me like that…turned around after shutting the door and found an interviewee standing there. (I cringed at the thought of it) Anyway so she asked me to join my colleague downstairs in the sports hall, and en route I saw an unfamiliar (yet tall) face waiting at the door. I gingerly opened the door, and was met with a lad in his late teens, behind him I saw some of the cheeky buggers sneering, my eyes narrowed towards them. I drew my attention back to the teen…who had great difficulty letting his words out, in between the stuttering, stammering and general difficulty, he managed to say that he was here to apologise for his language before… I told him that the person he wanted to apologise to was busy at the moment, but he could come back later…my heart warmed to him instantly over the fact that he had the guts to come back and apologise for his wrongdoings, but something wasn’t right, I glanced at the cheeky buggers behind him once more and shut the door. By now my body was wearing down, my stomach was beginning to complain about the fact that it hadn’t had proper food since lunch time (apparently the bowl of angel delight I had at 4ish didn’t count), my feet were tiring out, and my body was running on its "Reserve For Emergency Energy Store". I needed a good plate of food and my bed ASAP.
9 o clock came (It took its bloody time too!) and it was time for the kids to go, they all went with relative ease and little trouble until the last one was left to leave….The only girl we had in today (apart from the few from the other clubs), but to be honest I would have been surprised if she had gone without causing trouble…… As she left I could see she had a mouth full of water, from her body language I could see she was threatening to spit it out. I thought “she wouldn’t dare”, but at the same time I didn’t want to see whether or not she would dare and ushered her out as fast as I could. However as I was shutting the door she grabbed hold of it and let out a spray of water from her mouth, what proceeded was a tug of war for the door. She maintained what little dignity she had by not hurtling a great gob full of spit at me…it was more like spittle (I was slightly grateful at this). My immediate (yet shallow) thought was “MY SKIN!!” I could literally hear my brain screaming as flecks of the heinous substance landed on my skin. My face was the clearest it had been in days, I was not going to let one girl and her spit ruin it. At this point I heard a “that’s disgusting “behind me, I turned to see about six kids and two staff from the other two clubs watching as if it was a theatre production or something, great that’s all I needed. I was surprised at the girl’s strength (or my weakness), if I shut the door I would trap her fingers, and then there’s all the rules and regulations about not having physical contact with the children etc. I couldn’t say anything to her, I couldn’t make eye contact with her, she had lost that right the instant he spat at me. I told her she was banned only to be told that she “didn’t care”, “so what”, “good”. Eventually I did get the door shut, and I didn’t give the matter another thought until later on. Once our “guests” had gone, we reflected on the evenings events, I told my supervisor about her visitor and she told me he came again and she spoke to him, she mentioned that he had “special needs” and even though he was quite overbearing he had the innocence and lexis of a child. It turned out that the cheeky buggers behind him had told him to say what he did, despite the fact that they were so younger than him, and the sad thing is that he did it. My heart went out to him, I felt so sorry for him it was unbelievable.
We left the club at about ten to ten (we are supposed to leave at 9.30), I love driving home at that time, the roads are dead and the sun is setting when coupled with the melodious words of the Quran filling the car it’s an excellent opportunity to wind down. However not that day, I couldn’t stop thinking about what that girl did, the thing that made the whole situation worse was that she was muslim, she wore a headscarf and an abayah. She was a representative of Islam a beautifully perfect religion but she had stained it… I wasn’t even bothered anymore about the fact that she had spat at me, the spit had washed off, but the impression she left on the non muslim visitors at our club couldn’t be washed of with soap and water. It incensed me so much, words cannot describe my feelings. Those people had come from a predominantly white area, they probably didn’t have such close contact with muslims that often, the potential was there to give them a favourable impression about muslims and Islam. But no it didn’t happen. What did they go away with instead?....that all muslims are disgusting and mannerless. The fury inside me stirred, it awoke and rose to a crescendo, to my surprise I found myself fighting back tears, tears of anger.
I got home and was too tired to speak more than a few words to anyone, but I needed food. My mum had cooked brown rice (not palau rice, they’re actually brown before you cook them) with chicken, the taste was so comforting, the rice tasted divine, the taste was very different to white rice, it calmed me down a great deal. I craved the comfort and warmth of my bed, yet once I was alone in the dark, my mind started obsessing about the days events once more, it frustrated me, I was mentally and physically exhausted I just wanted to sleep. I needed sleep like I needed oxygen, yet it was being withheld from me, I begged my mind to rest, to stop thinking, just for a few moments so I could drift into a deep restful sleep. After what seemed like a lifetime it heeded my begging and my craving for sleep was satisfied.