PERSPECTIVE

Mentoring teens in trouble opens windows of understanding and compassion.

A Bay View woman learns how the other side of her city lives by mentoring girls full of hope but also hard lessons.

She is more than I bargained for. On a freezing January afternoon, we sit across from each other in a North Side school for the first time, the sole occupants in a classroom crowded with sagging, ripped sofas and hardback books decades out of date. My heart pummels my ribcage. I have no idea how to talk to children, let alone moody teens. I am 38 years old, recently married and childless.

“How is your day going?” I ask, as a newly minted mentor assigned to a 13-year-old petite African-American girl, her long hair in a ponytail, wearing a polo shirt and jeans.

What follows in the first 45-minute session is a manic feed of what it’s like to be a teen on Milwaukee’s North Side, which I quickly realize is different than my upbringing in a suburb north of Chicago.

I lean in for the story, the bitter truth. All students at this school have been expelled from Milwaukee Public Schools, are African-American, and live in that shaded area on crime maps that many outsiders won’t drive through at night.

I keep the calm, “no-judgment” face we were taught during orientation. After all, I just want to be a friend, and may be the only person in her life who listens without judgment. I hear the horrid details of the past 24 hours. A girl threatened her on the city bus, she says, and when I ask how she’s going to resolve it, she tells me, without skipping a beat: “With my mom’s boyfriend’s gun.” It’s as if she’s telling me what she ate for lunch an hour earlier.

I dig into neutral territory: “Where is