YOUR NEIGHBOR

WHAT IS P.H.O.B.E.?

People Helping Others By Example has been involved in nonprofit activities and services to the community for more than 20 years, and basically, we started out just trying to document the African-American history of Hot Springs because I came back from Chicago to my home city, and that area that I lived in looked so decimated, and I just couldn’t figure out what had happened. My mom told me to talk to our senior adults because they have the stories in their heads, and I was, like, wow, that makes sense.

WHAT DOES P.H.O.B.E. DO?

We started a program just going in and talking to seniors and getting them to tell us their stories, and that turned out really good. We were doing it with pictures and using audiotape. All of a sudden, I realized that wasn’t as fun because sometimes they don’t have all the pictures necessary to make audio really exciting. We thought, oh, let’s use videotape. We started videotaping their oral histories, and later on, we started to work with young people. Putting those two [groups] together made a wonderful combination. You had the wisdom of the old and the [inexperience] of the young. [The young people] would ask the seniors questions, and the seniors loved it. We have more than 100 oral histories on film. WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR FAVORITE PLACES IN HOT SPRINGS? I like going to The Muses, which has The Muses Creative Project. They have seasonal programs where they invite us to bring the young people in our program so they can be exposed to theater, music and opera on a level they would not ordinarily be able to see.