News

Cool to be Kind

Continued from page 3

Not long afterward he dropped out of school and moved to Peru to volunteer at an orphanage. When he returned to the States, he met some Catholic Workers and took up residence at a house of hospitality. He moved to St. Louis after meeting Carolyn Griffeth last spring. He no longer goes to nightclubs because they remind him of how his life might have turned out. The life he has found instead, he says, gives him far greater satisfaction.

That doesn't surprise Ken Sheldon, a psychologist at the University of Missouri-Columbia who studies positive psychology. "It sounds trivial, telling someone to commit two random acts of kindness a day," the psychologist says. "But most days are kind of blah. Even if you just make one person feel good, that can make a big difference in a life.

"It's interesting, because it implies that real altruism might not be possible," Sheldon adds. "This says there's something in it for you. But that doesn't mean it's not admirable."

When he's not doing odd jobs as an electrician or farming at New Roots, Arteaga helps Griffeth home-school Finn Mateo's thirteen-year-old brother, Ghana.

Griffeth met Ghana eight years ago while volunteering at a street camp for homeless children in Mongolia. "He had a lot of needs," she says. "He still has a lot of needs." At the time, he couldn't remember his own name and was so malnourished that he still appeared to be a toddler.

Griffeth's husband, Tery McNamee, proposed the night she arrived home with Ghana. They were living in a Catholic Worker community in Chicago, but the neighborhood was gentrifying. "A Starbucks had moved in," Carolyn says. "We knew it was time to move out."

Part of what drew them to St. Louis was the cheap real estate. In 2001 they bought a house on Monroe Street in north St. Louis for $7,000. Soon they were offering hospitality. They named the house after fellow Catholic Worker Carl Kabat. (Kabat, who was the subject of "The Clown Priest," a July 26, 2006, story by Riverfront Times staff writer Ben Westhoff, is serving a fifteen-month sentence in federal prison for breaking into a nuclear missile facility in North Dakota.) A few years later they bought a house across the street for $10,000, adopted Finn from Guatemala and moved in. For the first time, they were living as a nuclear family, without guests.

Her family, Griffeth says, is often the only one in the neighborhood without air-conditioning. "Everyone wants what's been denied," she says. "People who are oppressed have a greater need for security, success, comfort. What we want is a meaningful, joyful life. In part, we can go after this because we have parents and relatives who would back us up if we fell on our faces."

Adds Griffeth: "We want what everyone truly wants: to have a community, to be accepted, loved, a part of something meaningful. We have the support to do what most people want to do but don't have the freedom to do."

Arteaga moved into Kabat House last June, and today he and three other Workers manage the house and offer hospitality.

Another couple, 22-year-old Susannah and 26-year-old Stephen, live in an abandoned house nearby. They have no electricity or running water, and they're frequent visitors at Kabat House." They're not my blood family," Stephen says of his neighbors. "But it's the best family experience I've ever had."

On Finn Mateo's second birthday, Workers and guests gather in Kabat House's small kitchen to sing "Happy Birthday." Finn's present, wrapped in a pillowcase, is an interlocking wooden train set given to Carolyn Griffeth by a friend. His cake is a donated muffin from Whole Foods with one candle on top.

Stephen helps himself from a box filled with more Whole Foods pastries. "These are, like, three bucks each," he says. "They're so good."

Then he and Susannah head back to their squat, which is heated by a wood-burning stove. An American flag serves as the door between the bedroom and the kitchen.

Previously, Stephen lived at the Lemp Neighborhood Arts Center, a nonprofit in south St. Louis' Benton Park neighborhood that has become a haven for experimental musicians. But he says there was little involvement with the local community.

"That's always a problem when you get a group of progressive white people together and they move to a poor neighborhood," Stephen says. "They encounter that other side of things: The neighbors treat their children a certain way, play their music really loud. Here there's so much more interaction. That's what sold me on it."

A few years back, a group of Catholic Workers and Karen House guests decided to create Dorothy Day Cohousing, a long-term community where they could try to share their lives on more equal footing. Cohousing participants didn't live under the same roof, but they shared meals and prayed together. There were also meetings — lots of meetings.

Carolyn Griffeth, whose family took part in the project, which has since disbanded, describes it as "an interesting experiment."

Another participant, Lorraine (who declined to give her last name), laughs when she hears Griffeth's summation. "It was," she says. Then she's silent.

The first time Lorraine was a guest at Karen House, in the mid-1980s, she had three children, was pregnant with her fourth and was trying to escape a domestic situation that had turned violent. Ultimately, she'd bear eight children over seven years, ending with twins.

Though she battled a crack addiction, her main goal was always to keep her family under one roof. "If Karen House wasn't there, I don't know where I'd be," she says. "I probably wouldn't have my children together. I probably wouldn't be off drugs. They have become not just my friends, they are also my support system."

She's sitting in the front room of the house where she now lives, a few blocks from Karen House, dressed in a blue velour tracksuit and wearing glasses with thick lenses and clear frames. It's afternoon, and the sun slants through the blinds. She has her wood-paneled television set tuned to a Christian channel.

Once during the Cohousing era, Griffeth decorated a willow branch with berries and origami animals as a stand-in for a traditional Christmas tree. "Lorraine's children said they guessed it was better than nothing," Griffeth remembers. "It was a relationship between two completely different worldviews and cultures," she adds. "The cross-racial and cross-cultural aspect was difficult."

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
Next Page »