Gardening in Response to Violence

Our Friends, the Magnottas, live in the other half of our Duplex. Sara Magnotta is the Guest Blogger for this Post - Thanks Sara!

Lincoln Park, the neighborhood we live in, has a few consistent variables: sirens, random yelling late at night, a plethora of ways to use a shopping cart, magical alleys-anything that could be used for scrap metal immediately disappears, and lots of tragedy. And where there is frequent tragedy people become numb, it’s how to survive. I feel that if we want to be a positive impact, we cannot allow ourselves to go numb.

We have had the unfortunate opportunity to practice being anti-numb. A few months ago there was a homicide in the early morning hours in the park. Instead of going on with life like nothing happened we had the urge to act and create beauty in response to the fear and horror we felt. My husband Chris decided to take out all the weeds in the front yard. This was a project we were saving for later when I had a bit more energy since I am still a new mom. However, Chris felt strongly about the project and that alone gave me the zest to help. A caveat about me is that I have never wanted to be that person who put a lot of time into a perfectly manicured yard, or anything that screams, “I need everyone else’s approval to feel good about myself.” So even though I LOVE gardening, part of me was a little paranoid about sending the wrong message, like, “Okay, this is what a front yard is supposed to look like, please notice there are no plastic flowers, fake animals, or Saint Mary’s in a bathtub shrine, go and do likewise.” But the way Chris acted was so beautiful that that message was nowhere to be found. First of all he pulled all the weeds by hand, used a pickaxe to till the soil (definitely enjoyed watching that) and mend it with manure, and to top it off we found free mulch on Craigslist, cost effective and environmentally friendly. With Lucia in tow I got to do the best part, design a drought resistant garden that fit Chris’ taste and mine. Along the way we got to know some of our neighbors and talk to them about what we were doing. They were all very appreciative of Chris’ hard work (he was sweating up a storm). My favorite comment that Chris would say is, “Something completely ghetto took place and so we need to do the opposite of that and make some beauty.” When I look at our beautifully xeri-scaped yard I not only reminisce on the time we spent together, but I also see it as a memorial of hope.

Another way that we avoided becoming numb was call upon the body of Christ. Later that week with the help of our missions pastor Dave Neuhausel, we visited the exact location of the homicide and had a time of blessing. Several leaders in different inner city ministries came alongside us to bless, cry, and stand together for the city as light and hope. It was beautiful and cathartic.

In addition, I was able to air my fears and regrets with brothers and sisters who understood and have walked where we are now. The night of the homicide, I was nursing my daughter and heard yelling and screaming coming from the park, as if a couple was having an argument. Chris woke up so I asked him if he thought I should call the police. He told me that would be a good idea, so I started looking for my phone. Half asleep and sleep deprived I realized that my phone was downstairs and that I would have to turn off the alarm to make the call. I strained my ear to see if I could still hear anything, but the voices were gone. I figured I should just try and get some sleep, and that it was probably nothing, because those screams are not all that uncommon. That morning when I woke up and learned that a body was found in the park, I was in complete shock. A multitude of emotions went through my body all at once, regret, sadness, fear, anger, and selfishness. I have no idea if there could be a connection, but it doesn’t take away the regret I hold since I did not call and ask the police to check the park. That is why the time of blessing was so much more than just a gathering and words spoken. To all of us it was a starting point for the healing process. To be able to flush that out, grieve Sean’s life and the pain and torment that now lingers with those who took the life was very hard, but very needed.

--
S.E. Weaver Magnotta

I got a kick out of this shopping cart (bike locked to the clothes line post) when I was walking home from the light rail in our neighborhood! - Kirsten

Extreme Community Makeover comes to Lincoln Park

Last Saturday we joined with an organization called Extreme Community Makeover which happened to come to our neighborhood of Lincoln Park this past weekend.

Extreme Community Makeover is an organization that invites people into a partnership with residents of typically lower income Denver neighborhoods to complete home and neighborhood improvement projects. It serves as a way to build relationships with the residents and at the same time help them with work around their house. It usually involves painting, yard work, or other projects identified by the residents.

On Saturday, there were about 8 of us who helped Victor and his family paint their house. Victor lives with his family and some other extended family members (total of 10 people) in about a 900 sq ft house! An important part of ECM is to work “with” the family so Victor, his wife, and his kids were also out there with us painting. ECM was able to work with Home Depot to get the paint donated.

Around noon everyone working on various ECM projects around the neighborhood (probably about 100 of us total) was supposed to meet back at a designated location to eat lunch. But, before we could go anywhere, Victor’s wife brought out a huge pot of soup with fresh tortillas, peppers and chili for everyone to eat. It was delicious and great to be able to enjoy a meal with the family!

Participate in Creating a Better World, One Couch at a Time

What if someone in a different part of the country or world opened up their house to you?

Last weekend we hosted some people from couchsurfing.org at our house. It is a way for those who are travelling to stay on people’s couches in lieu of renting a hotel (in our case we had a spare bedroom). This way when you are visiting a city, you can stay with a local who knows about the area, knows the language, and you can make connections with other people around the country and world.

We hosted a couple during their road trip throughout the western US. It was our first experience and we weren’t really sure what to expect. It turned out to be a great experience and we met some wonderful people. We had planned on grilling some burgers with our neighbors and invited our couch surfers to join us. We had great conversation and lots of laughs. I think the idea of building meaningful connections with people all around the country and the world by sharing your home and life with them is an amazing and logical concept. It makes the world just a little bit smaller.

We will be visiting South East Asia for 3 weeks at Christmas and hope we can find someone to host us while we’re travelling.

Check it out:
http://www.couchsurfing.org/

The Last 7 Months...

Well, it’s been quite a while since I’ve written and a lot has happened. I'm really considering giving up writing in a blog altogether (I really don’t think I’m much of a blog person) but through the encouragement of my friend Bekah, I decided to give it one more try (no promises though). So here it goes…

In a very small nutshell, here is what happened in the last 7 months. I tutored a 1st grader in the Lincoln Park housing across the street. The Magnottas completed the remodel of their side of the duplex and did an amazing job. It makes us really look forward to the remodel of our side someday. They finally moved in and about a week later had baby Lucia. James moved to Wyoming for 6 months for a work assignment working 70 to 80 hours per week out in the middle of nowhere WY in the middle of winter. He moved back home in June.


Kitchen Before


Kitchen After


Dining Room Before


Dining Room After


Living/Dining Before


Living/Dining After

Bridge Project

I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do in this neighborhood and what organizations I want to get involved in. I really wanted to work with the refugee population in Lincoln park. I used to teach English to a refugee woman from Burma and I wanted to do something similar in this neighborhood. We have a large population of Somalians who live in the Government Housing right next to us. However, the current need for English teaching in Lincoln Park was assisting and teaching a class during the day. Since I have to work during the day, this option wasn't really possible for me.

I found another organization though called The Bridge Project. The Bridge Project is an organization that works to provide educational opportunities for children living in Denver's public housing neighborhoods so they graduate from high school and attend college or learn a trade. They work in 3 of Denver's public housing locations - Lincoln Park being one of them.

Today I went to orientation where I was able to learn a little bit more about what this organization does. The orientation was really informative. The kids that live in these housing situations tend to not have the same educational message that I grew up with. There's no one there telling them why good grades are so important or the possibilities that a college education will give you. No one is asking them what they learned in school today and what their favorite subjects are. No one is making sure they get their homework done or even providing them a place where they can study and focus on their homework. This is where the Bridge Project comes in.

If I choose to work with them, I would be paired with a child who lives in Lincoln Park Housing and I would mentor/tutor them once a week. I still have to get a background check and complete more training before I can get started. I plan to be praying about this opportunity for the next few weeks while I finish the necessary steps to get started.

Kirsten


Lincoln Park Public Housing that is right next door

Pictures!

So I'm finally getting around to posting pictures. Here are pictures and videos to give you a better idea of the inside and outside of the duplex.


Before the new paint


Starting to Paint


Painting


Still Painting


Pretty much done - just a little left to go


Our old kitchen sink


Working on replacing the sink in the kitchen


James isn't the only one who knows how to do stuff :)


Building the Garage


Garage is almost done


We love it when the fruit and vegetable truck stops by our house




North Side video - 1st floor


North Side video - 2nd floor


South Side video - 1st floor


South Side video - 2nd floor

The Beginning of it All...

Isn't it a beauty?

As many of you know we recently bought a Duplex in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Denver, CO.

It all started 2 years ago when James and I used to ride the light rail downtown and we would pass by the “10th and Osage” station. We could tell just by looking out the window of the train that the neighborhood was definitely a lower income neighborhood. However, all the Denver Light Rail lines ran through this one small station. It got us thinking what a great investment a house in this neighborhood would be since it was less than a mile from downtown and a main thoroughfare of the Light Rail. We did some more research and noticed that the average home price in the neighborhood was well below the average Denver home price – and thus started our house hunt.

We looked at several houses for over a year. The original plan was to buy a place and immediately rent it out. We wanted to take advantage of the low cost of houses before the neighborhood started transforming/improving. We found several places that we liked but none that seemed “perfect” or what we thought would be perfect at the time. On one house-hunting trip we visited a 2 story duplex built in 1890 with an asking price of $290,000. We thought it was a great place and would be a great investment especially since it’s hard to find a whole duplex for sale – generally it’s just half of a duplex for sale at a time. However, we didn’t think much of it because it was well over our price range and too big of a project to take on ourselves not to mention we didn’t have the cash to fix it and make it livable. We jokingly mentioned it to our friends, Chris and Sara who have a few other investment properties of their own, as to how fun it would be to go in on a deal like this together. Much to our surprise, Chris and Sara approached us the next day and said they might actually be interested. We put an offer in on the house for $270,000. To make a long story short, a YEAR after we put the initial offer on the house we finally closed for $200,000. There are a LOT of details involved with how we got from $270k to $200k and MANY miracles that happened along the way (and we mean miracles – there are just certain things that DON’T happen in the mortgage industry or the real estate market that miraculously worked in our favor). We really feel that after all that happened, this was truly a gift from God that he has entrusted into our care.

Now, I want to back up a little. In that year that we were trying to close on the duplex, our hearts changed a lot in the purpose of buying in this neighborhood than we originally anticipated. It was originally going to be used as “a good investment”. However, our faith community had been talking a lot about living in community with one another. A few families in our faith community had even moved into a low income neighborhood to live communally and missionally together and be the salt and light in their immediate neighborhoods. This got James, Chris, Sara, and me thinking. We had already thought about it before but didn’t really see the means of getting into this kind of situation – I mean, we both had houses that we already lived in so even if we got this Duplex we would have to do something with our current houses – either sell or rent and we didn’t know what the current market would be like if we did either of these things. Our plan was to get the duplex in livable shape and rent out as soon as possible and maybe one day we could both live there together in community. As we continued to take one step after the other in getting this duplex, we came to the conclusion that we didn’t want to wait to live in this neighborhood – we wanted to get started and change the direction of our lives now.

Yesterday James and I sold our current house (it was on the market for a week and a half before it went under contract) and have officially moved into the duplex. It’s been somewhat of an adjustment and is definitely not the residence I’m used to but I think it’s good to never get too comfortable. And anytime I feel like life is too hard and uncomfortable, I try to think of the how the majority of the rest of the people in the world live and about the poverty stricken places that we’ve visited like Africa and Peru and I quickly have a reality check. We may have gotten our plumbing working just in time, and even though we don’t have hot water or a working kitchen, we have a roof over our heads and I have a wonderful husband to lie next to each night.

Michael Hidalgo teaches at our faith community and has a blog that I love to read. Here are some of his comments I took from his blog that I feel puts words to what we’re striving towards:

“What would it be like if we were a faith community who said that we were about the Kingdom of Heaven? What if people knew that we did not care about possessions, buying, selling, making tons of money, fame and fortune. What if we did not buy into the lie that Empire has fed to us called the "American Dream" of health, wealth and happiness? What if we lived as people who shared everything, and gave to those who had need? What if we were people who chose to be among the poor, the outcasts and the least of these? What if we proclaimed the words of Jesus, "The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these?"

What would it be like if we were a faith community who lived within the darkest places in our city? The whorehouses, the porn shops, the crack neighborhoods, and were seen as a city that was shining on a hill that cannot be hidden? What if we engrossed ourselves in the lives of the unlovely? What if we believed that the hungry, the homeless, the imprisoned, the sick, the thirsty, and the outcasts were Jesus in disguise? What if we were known as a place who loved these people and pointed them toward Jesus?”

And so we move forward with the purpose of being salt and light in a neighborhood that my suburban friends can’t imagine why I would want to move into.

We have a general idea of how we want to live among our neighbors in Lincoln Park but other than that we have no clue what that’s going to eventually look like. However, I know that God will continue to lead this journey and we will continue to move forward and follow him one step at a time.

Our friends Chris and Sara have recently put their house on the market so please pray for a quick sale so they can join us as soon as possible in Lincoln Park.

I will be posting pictures as time goes on so check back for more updates.

A few interesting statistics about the neighborhood:

- 52.09% of children live with single parents. All neighborhoods in Denver average 28.01%.
- 53.76% of births are to unwed mothers. All neighborhoods in Denver average 33.24%.
- 63.99% of single mothers with children live in poverty. All neighborhoods in Denver average 32.58%.
- Crime rate per 1,000 Persons 235. All neighborhoods in Denver 78.

- Median household income is $24,624. Denver median household income is $51,492