Flowers in a Vacant Lot

I finally got to go down to Bamberg yesterday, to meet with Student Council and Junior Leadership members of Bamberg-Erhardt High School. I had heard about the extreme poverty from a lot of students and faculty. Once I got off of I-26 in and got past Orangeburg, the terrain suddenly looked very familiar and I realized I felt at home because the sandy soil, cotton fields and pine trees reminded me of the roads I drive through Flomaton, AL when I visit my Nana in Pensacola, FL.

So I immediately felt at home and understood the poverty. But, Bamberg isn't Flomaton. Honest to goodness, the town is all but dead, and they don't know it. But ignorance is bliss and the kids at the high school, and the townsfolk working with the Mayor's Institute to come up with a design solution to encourage economic growth, are like the proverbial flower in a vacant lot. Things go to die in vacant lots- broken bottles, dead animals, sometimes human bodies, cars- they all die in vacant lots, and in turn those lots choke neighborhoods. But there is ALWAYS a flower that thrives in those lots, no matter how much trash there is around the lot. The kids are like that flower. They were bright, intelligent and excited to see something down in Bamberg.

I met with the students for about 1/2 hour. My goal was to talk about the Bamberg design workshop and its purpose. I HOPE that at least a couple of the students will be able to make the Bamberg town design workshop October 18, 2008.

In all honesty, some students used the meeting time as a means to get out of class. But I think there was some genuine interest. I laid out a map of the area around their high school and put some trace paper over that. The students had the markers and with some prompting, they laid out what was in their town, where they hung out and what they wanted for their town. Obviously much of what they put down had to do with what they wanted and didn't necessarily consider the rest of the population, but that was ok too because it was about them at this point.

When I started the meeting, I asked how many wanted to stay in town after they graduated and there wasn't one single person who wanted to stay. They listed jobs and the lack of places for them to hang out as the biggest reasons for wanting to leave. While I can't do a thing about that, I did encourage them to think about the design workshop as a way to communicate to the older residents what might keep them. Bamberg's population is falling dramatically (I will post some charts at a later date) and if the town doesn't find a way to keep these kids and the ones that follow, the town as they know it, will cease to exist.