Mary Carr rings the buzzer Sunday morning at the high-rise apartment building in the lower, eastern section of New York City. Vividly projecting her Alabama drawl, Carr alerts the motherly voice that she is ready to take the children to church.
“Thank you. They’ll be right down,” the faceless voice replies in an obvious New York accent.
Today three youth file out of the building. Two others join them from around the corner. Sometimes 10 or 12 appear, sometimes fewer. Hugs and glimmering smiles come quickly as the neatly donned children and teenagers greet Carr. Together they walk the short distance to East Seventh Baptist Church-Graffiti, known to most as Graffiti Church.
These five children and teenagers ranging in age from eight to 18 bounce into the church ready to greet the other 30 to 40 youth that may attend today.
“Kids make up half our congregation,” said Carr, who serves as children’s director. The Morgan City native has spent most of the last 10 years serving Graffiti, a 25-year-old church and community ministry that works with children and the homeless in the area.
Taylor Field, director of Graffiti Community Ministries, beams when discussing the role Carr plays at Graffiti. Noting her love for Jesus and her love for the children, Field said, “She wants to help the children, especially through the tough times. Part of Graffiti’s ministry is to help the people who fall through the cracks. And she does that.
“She has a heart for people in difficult circumstances,” said Field, who has served the ministry for the past 16 years. “She has been one of the best missionaries I’ve ever known. Alabama has a lot to be proud of.”
Carr left her north Alabama home and familiar culture in 1992 for a three-year missions term in New York City. Through the North American Mission Board’s USC-2er program, Carr discovered Graffiti Ministries.
The USC-2 program requires participants to fund themselves, so Carr’s home church — Pine Ridge Baptist Church, Union Grove, near Morgan City — supported her. “They continue to support me,” she added. When her USC-2 term ended, she attended Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., a little more than a year before returning to the work she loves so intensely.
In the years since her first moments in the graffiti-laden neighborhood where drug deals happen on every corner and bars decorate the windows, Carr has grown the children’s ministry by more than 500 percent.
“When she first came we had 20 kids coming to our Christmas program,” Field said. “Last year we had 900.”
Carr works with an average of 50 children a week in two after-school tutoring programs. Before last fall, she supervised four tutoring programs a week, which offered assistance to 150 kids.
“I didn’t understand why God was closing the door on two of our four tutoring programs,” Carr said, noting a lack of financial resources and obvious direction from God to cut back the program. “I was heartbroken. I knew we would lose 100 kids.”
And they did. “It was terrible,” she said, “But after Sept. 11, I knew why. There was no way we could have handled 150 kids after the attacks.”
Located less than one mile from the New York City financial district, the neighborhood around Graffiti experienced the horror and eeriness of the tragedy as traffic in and out of the area was frozen. Emergency vehicles streamed up and down streets; thick, heavy smoke hung in the air for more than a month. While masks helped the people breathe, they did not hide the smell that haunted the area for almost three months.
“The kids still talk about it,” Carr said. “They bring it up all the time. It was a scary time for them,” she explained, noting their confusion when store shelves emptied and remained vacant until the freeze on nonemergency vehicles was lifted.
While these children did not lose parents when the Twin Towers crumbled — their relatives do not hold jobs common to the financial district — the resulting unemployment has affected them, Carr said. The excessive loss of jobs threw yet another blow to the already frail family unit in the community.
“A dysfunctional family would be a compliment in this neighborhood,” she said. “Kids are fortunate to have one parent; most don’t.”
Relatives usually raise the children, especially grandmothers, Carr noted. “Girls start having babies at 15, so it is not unusual to see a woman raising her great-grandchildren.”
Only 17 percent of the kids in the area graduate from high school, she said, adding that few of those are girls.
“Out of the 2,000 kids I’ve worked with over the years, I can count on one hand how many will make it,” Carr said. “I had never known of a girl graduating from high school until last year. Two girls and one boy from our ministry made it,” she said with a glimmer. “So there is hope.”
Still, the kids do not always stick with the program, she noted. “It takes a long time to reach these kids. They don’t know what love is. We have a long way to go to build that relationship,” she said, adding some have accepted Christ as teenagers after growing up in the ministry.
“One of the greatest rewards is to see a child begin to understand what love is because unconditional love is a foreign concept here. When I first came, they were very tense when I would hug them,” she said. “Now they are fine; they come up and hug me.”
But every new child experiences that same resistance to a kind touch. “It takes them awhile,” she said. And even though they eventually respond positively, the results are not always encouraging.
“It is hard to see 12-year-olds who have been in our program selling drugs on the corner,” Carr said. “They are respectful and will stop the deal when I walk by … but very few make it here,” she said tearfully. “Still, we want them to be able to experience God’s love.”
With the philosophy of “one day at a time” and “little by little,” Carr and the others at Graffiti Ministries hold on to the small victories such as when a child understands the meaning of prayer for the first time. “If the ministry helps one child, then it is worth it,” she said.
And so Carr continues inviting kids to church each Sunday and to the after-school tutoring program during the week. She will return next week to ring the buzzer and hug the kids. And she hopes they all appear.
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