Sit With Them

     For two years of my almost twenty five years of life, I was a white missionary, sent to a region still reeling from trauma inflicted by white missionaries. I had the potential to do a lot of damage. Thankfully, I was trained to step back and listen. I quickly learned that a big part of being a white missionary in a place that is not predominately white is learning to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. I'm sure there were many times I did the wrong thing without even realizing it, and I may never know all of the mistakes I made as a white person trying to be a positive influence on youth who are part of a culture that I quite honestly knew nothing about before moving to Nome.
     There's a story I've never told because it's so special to me that I wanted to save it for the right time. It's a story about a youth who was struggling and the way her peers stayed with her through her struggle.
     This story starts right as the Boys and Girls Club was about to close on a Friday night. The last five minutes on Friday nights always seemed to bring up strong feelings, probably because many youth were facing a weekend in an unstable home.
     I didn't do much during that hour, but it stands out as possibly the most important hour of my mission experience. By that time I had enough experience with our youth having panic attacks that I had a pretty good idea of what to do. I was prepared to sit with her after everyone left. but as closing time came and went, I realized we were not alone. The group of teens there that night had no intention of leaving until they could all leave together.
     That night, I watched teenage boys call home to say they would miss curfew because the were doing something important, because they were helping a friend. I watched these young men put their Friday night plans on hold without a second thought in order to support a friend. I watched them quietly sit down on the floor beside her.
     Not once did they suggest that she should just get over it. Not once did they make fun of her or invalidate her feelings in any way. Instead, they sat with her. Some of them shared stories of their own struggles with the same thing, and the significance of young men being vulnerable about their emotions was not lost on me.
     We sat together on the floor for an hour. We talked about the science of panic attacks, and how it takes the brain a while to process that there is no actual danger. We shared jokes and moments of comfortable silence. We counted every tile in the ceiling, twice. After an hour, she felt good enough to walk home, and I watched that whole group of teens leave together. I can't recall a time I was ever more proud of all of them.
     Most of the young men in this story are not white. I struggled with whether or not to share this story at this time because they aren't black either. In the spirit of being comfortable with being uncomfortable and after weighing the risk of saying the wrong thing against the risk of saying nothing, I decided that now is not the time for silence.
     I have worried about these Alaska Native boys for as long as I have known them, and the devastating realization that I live in a country where men of color are murdered in broad daylight by the very people who are supposed to protect them has greatly deepened that worry. I wish these young men lived in a world that would treat them the way they treated their friend that night. I wish I didn't worry about them when I see them walking around town with their hoods up and their hands in their pockets, because that is not a crime and I hate that it even crosses my mine that it might be considered one. I wish they lived in a world that would not suspect them, harass them, and murder them because of their brown skin. I wish they were growing up in a society that knew how to sit with them and seek to understand them.

If they can do it for their peers, why can't we do it for them?