Stories of Detroit

By: Hannah Sweetman

Little kids run around my feet. There’s a bouncy house in one corner, jump rope in  another, and craft tables in a third. The fourth corner is home to the doors; gray metal with a push bar on the first, and gray metal with a handle that locks on the second. I feel a tug on my shirt and I look down, a little face looks up at me, so I squat down to be at his height. “Hi, I’m Hannah, what’s your name?” I ask him, “Trystan, I’m three!” He replies, “I want to braid your hair.” I sit down fully and let him take out my hair tie, which I see fall on the ground and discreetly stick in my pocket. Even though he may have braided before, I’ve learned the hard way that there’s a very high chance my hair tie will be so twisted in my hair I might need to cut it out. In a matter of minutes I go from having just Trystan doing my hair, to four other preschoolers who want to help him out. After a while my hair is considered “Perfect” and everyone backs away. A couple of minutes later my team leaves with plans to visit the preschool center again the next day. 

For years my family has been a part of Detroit Love, and we run a day camp called Big A, and this preschool center used to be where we held our camp in the summer. There’s a big, brand new gym, tables, and plenty of kids who want to play. A group of us return the next day, and we receive a warm welcome. Trystan runs up to me and yells that he wants to play with my hair again. This time instead of sitting behind me, he sits right in front of me and declares that he “thinks he’s in love.” I smile and laugh, and remind him that he’s only three, and he proceeds to tell me that the girl he’s planning on asking to marry him is me. I look at his face for a minute and realize he’s completely serious, so, holding in my laughter, I tell him I think he needs to wait a little longer before he gets married. He looks dejected for a minute, but a couple seconds later he’s feeling better and wants to play with the hula hoops. 

A couple of days after that experience it began to rain. No one wants to play outside when it’s hot, muddy, and wet, so we moved all of our activities inside. The big activity for the day was a play put on by the kids. Everyone who wanted to participate was assigned a part and a name tag identifying them as a character in the story. The basic story was that of Zacheus, a very short man who wants to see Jesus and climbs into a tree so that he is tall enough to see him. In the end he meets Jesus and Jesus goes to Zacheus’ house for dinner. There’s a song that goes along with the story, unfortunately, because we were inside, we didn’t have access to a tree. The play began and all of the characters were working through their lines. We tried to start with the song, but my friend, Grace, went up to the front and started singing a song that turned into a trainwreck. The older kids were being great sports and then Jason, who was playing the part of Zacheus, decided to be helpful. He climbed up on a chair, and told the audience it was a tree, and then he yelled, “Hey Jesus, you wanna hang out with me!?” The character playing Jesus looked over at him and said, “Sure…” and Jason grinned, gave “Jesus” two thumbs up and tried to wink. Needless to say, the play didn’t go quite as planned, but it was really fun for everyone else involved. 

Each week a new team works with the kids at the daycare center, and at the end of that week, it was no different. The first team from Pennsylvania switched out with a team from Florida and we began work again starting Sunday. Originally, everyone was going to attend church together Sunday morning, but the team from Florida had a lot of trouble with their flights, and while they had a layover it started pouring rain, meaning all of the luggage that was on the tarmac was completely soaked. Eventually the team made it to the center at around two in the morning, and they quickly fell asleep even though their clothes and blankets were wet. Then, in the middle of the night, the air conditioning suddenly stopped working. It was the middle of July in Detroit, and after the rain, it was incredibly humid. The temperature was around ninety degrees every day and the damp clothes hanging off of every available surface would not dry, thanks to the humidity. Needless to say, on Sunday morning the team was not prepared for church after having not slept. My mom, a couple of other people, my siblings, and I headed out to the Masonic temple, where church was temporarily being held, ironically in part because it was too hot outside to host church in the nearby Cass Park. After church we headed back to the center and decided to take all of the clothes to a laundromat so that the building wouldn’t smell like sour clothes. In the past, we had had a washer and dryer in the basement, but after a severe rain the summer before, the washer and dryer had been declared unusable, and thrown out. The trip to the laundromat was expected to take several hours, so only a few people went to wash the clothes. The remaining people, about forty of us, stayed in the building and began prepping for camp the next day. 

Monday morning arrived quickly, and after another sleepless night without air conditioning, we woke up at seven and began working. After breakfast some of the team went to help serve lunch at a nearby homeless shelter, some people left to do a construction project, and the rest of us stayed at the center to clean and then come up with ideas to serve the community, or servant evangelism ideas. My group decided to show our appreciation for the fire department by making them a cake. We went to Food Lion and bought cake mix, icing, and a disposable pan, and then we headed to the kitchen. The cake itself turned out relatively well with only a few pieces falling off the side when we flipped it out of the pan. When we started icing the cake however, it started to fall apart. The upstairs was swelteringly hot without air conditioning, and the added heat of the stove made it a challenge to cool the cake. We froze it for about an hour and then we tried to decorate it. The base was white, and then there was a tree with a cat in it, and a fire truck ladder reaching up to the cat. However, after only about half an hour the cake began to melt. The fire truck on the side of the cake was too heavy for the center, and the cake began to pull itself apart. We tried to cover it up with icing, but Fluffy, the cat we had drawn onto the cake, fell into the massive sinkhole in the middle of the cake, and the fire truck slid almost completely off of the cake. We decided to freeze it again, and then bring it to the fire department; although it looked messy it tasted delicious. 

Our leader, James, drove us to the closest fire department, but they were closed, so we went to the central fire department training building. When we told the firefighters that the cake was for them, four of them looked at us like we were crazy, but the fifth firefighter thanked us, and took it inside out of the heat. 

The next day we headed out for a walk around the city. My group parked in a parking garage, and then we walked around downtown Detroit, praying for homeless people. We walked outside for a little over an hour, and then we began to get really hot. We walked back to the parking garage and tried to drive out, only to discover that our parking pass hadn’t fully printed, and wouldn’t scan on the scanner for the lot. We called the number displayed on the screen, and no one answered. We called the please help number and once again, no one answered. We decided that we would call the company that owned the parking lot, since we couldn’t get out of the parking lot, and after thirty minutes on hold someone finally answered the phone. We explained that the printer had broken and we were unable to drive out of the garage, and the lady on the phone told us that she could actually see us from her office, and she would go talk to her supervisor. About twenty minutes later we were allowed out of the parking garage without paying, and they remotely opened the gate for us. In the time that it took for the parking garage employees to let us out, McKinley fell asleep, and Maddie assembled an entire ukulele. 

The final day of missions trips, the teams are required to clean the building so that it is prepared for the next incoming team. The final day of the trip we began to clean the building. The building, or center, that we use in Detroit is a hundred year old building called the Don Polsky building. Originally it was a Polish community center before the Great Depression, but during the Great Depression it was secretly used as a place for the homeless and a place to hide alcohol. As a result, only the front half of the building is currently in working condition, meaning that there are only five major rooms, two hallways and three bathrooms to clean. Although this may seem like a relatively small task with fifty people working all at once, it’s a lot more challenging than it may seem. The main room, also known as the auditorium, takes at least an hour and a half to mop. You always have to sweep before you mop, because we eat in the auditorium and we don’t want mice. A couple of friends and I swept the auditorium, but once we reached the mopping stage we began to lose motivation. Then, we decided to listen to music. We were listening to Taylor Swift, belting out the lyrics and dancing while we mopped, when “Under the Sea” from “The Little Mermaid” began to play. Instead of wondering why that specific song was playing we choreographed a dance that went with our mopping and completely finished mopping the floor. Next up was the girls bunk room, which does not take nearly as much effort as the auditorium. The main things to clean in the girl bunk room are the floor, the top bunk and the bathroom attached to the room. I was put in charge of vacuuming, and the remainder of the chores were divided up amongst the rest of the girls, and after about another hour and a half the chores were finished. That night we had a bunch of the teens who came to the daycamp, Big A, over for dinner and we played basketball, danced and ate dinner. The next day when the team had to return to Florida, everyone felt a mix of sad, excited and happy. Sad to leave, excited to come back, and happy to go home.