Sad and Disgusting

It's been a sad, disgusting morning here at YDB.

It's been sad because it was discovered that one of our students was shot to death earlier this week. Apparently, our student, Harold, regularly stayed the night at drug houses (which are appropriately called "traps" by the students) doing deals, buying and selling. Sometime in the last five or six days, he was shot fifteen times while at one of these traps and his cousin, who is also in the program, just came in to tell us about it today. So it's been a somber morning. I feel a little conflicted. Harold was a terrible student. His defiant laziness knew no bounds and I really didn't like having him in class. He came late, left early, and slept almost all the time. Of course, now that I know what he was doing with his nights, it makes sense why he couldn't keep his eyes open during a discussion of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." Still, bad student or not, no one deserves to die in a drug house with fifteen holes in them. I wish he had decided that he would rather be fully in school and fully out of the drug world rather than trying to straddle both. I'm sorry he's gone.

It's also been a disgusting morning because I supervised the students' clean-up of the 2nd floor kitchen. We have a kitchen and lunchroom area for the students and they, as a rule, never clean up after themselves. Pots of half-eaten Ramen noodles sit in the sink with a film growing over the yellow broth, crumbs and crusts litter the counters, giant battleship flies buzz up out of the sink and garbage can. It's bad. So finally we as a staff snap and tell them to clean it up so we can lock it tight until they feel like taking better care of it.

As they are cleaning, I stop in to check their progress and they all tell me that none of them are touching the oven because there's "some kind of nest" in it. I open the door and discover a student has left a pot of two hot dogs he'd boiled in the oven - for about a week, I'd say. The hot dogs and the pot were crawling with squirming, white maggots.

Yep, that's right, folks. Come teach in Detroit where the glamour never ends!

I dumped the pot out, rinsed it, and gave it to a student to wash properly. (Suzanne tells me I should have just thrown it out entirely.) Once the students were done with the initial cleaning, I sent them to class and then left to go buy over cleaner, two-inch thick rubber gloves, and a mondo jug of Clorox Clean-Up so potent it comes in a sealed titanium hazmat spray bottle.

I will burn the bacteria from the kitchen area with my righteous anger and with severe chemicals. If only Clorox Clean-Up could erase the nasty, filmy feeling I have just being here today.