An image stays with me from Tuesday night’s meeting in 80219 with the Camp George West inmates. It is of a young woman. She is sitting in the sanctuary of the All Nations Ministries church building, about three rows from the altar.
When it is time for audience questions, she leans forward, perched on the edge of the pew, her elbows resting on the back of the bench in front of her.
Someone asks what drew the former gangsters to street life and what advice they’d give parents. Someone else wants to know what they’d say to young women who hang out with gang members.
The men, sitting on the altar steps in their prison greens, pass the mike back and forth. The young woman watches them as they say: I got into gangs because I didn’t know how to be my own person, because I was a follower, because I had a warped sense of what it means to be a man.
As they say: Women are used for sex, as drug mules and “where I grew up they were considered property and if they stuck around long enough, they got that (‘property of’) tattooed on their bodies.”
Something about the woman’s posture, the careful stillness of it, keeps drawing my attention. She raises her hand. Her voice is strong and clear: “What advice do you give to kids who want to get out but who are afraid?” A few minutes later she asks: “What advice do you wish your parents would have given you?”
She leaves the church before I can talk to her, but I get her name: Monique Apodaca. The name comes with a phone number.
Yes, she says when I call, you can come over. She gives me directions to her house, which is not far from South Federal Boulevard and West Alameda Avenue, on a block like many in this neighborhood, order and chaos sitting side by side.
Monique rents a small house with a Section 8 voucher. She lives there with her two daughters and her little brother, whom she is raising and who, at 11, is just a year older than her oldest daughter. She leads me though the living room to the dining room table with its decorative place settings. Everywhere, on the walls, on the shelves, are family photos, portraits of her and her daughters and brother, of her daughters alone, laughing.
Monique is 26. She tells me her mother was a heroin addict who died two years ago, and her father is in and out of her life. She was passed from relative to relative. What she remembers most about that time was feeling that she had ceased to become a person and had become instead an obligation.
She will say, with the perspective that time offers, with the forgiveness her faith teaches, that her parents loved her the only way they knew how. But it was the love of the wounded, of the sick and the selfish. And it was not enough.
Monique tells me she was jumped into a neighborhood set when she was 14. She became addicted to crack. She ran away. She dropped out of school when she was in seventh grade. She was pregnant at 15.
Luis Villareal, the executive director of the nonprofit Save Our Youth, which connects mentors with young people, often says: “We are the reflection of who we have been connected to, and we are the reflection of those we’ve been disconnected from.”
And that is Monique. At 16, in an act of courage or desperation or weariness, she called SOY and asked for a mentor. Donna Garcia, a social worker, became that person. For seven years, she worked with Monique, and they remain close. But the first four or five years were tough.
Garcia pulled Monique out of drug houses. She put her in a safe house when her boyfriend beat her. “Why do you stick around?” Monique would demand. “Why do you care?”
“They have walls up for a reason,” Garcia tells me. “But when they see you’re not giving up, they turn a corner.”
Monique received her GED. She is six classes away from her associate’s degree. She worked at her church. She makes and sells burritos at the SOY offices.
Is she out of the woods? I ask Garcia.
“I don’t think anyone is out of the woods when they’ve gone through what Monique did,” she says. “But she has grown a lot. She has matured a lot. She has healed a lot. I see her now stronger than she has ever been.”
Monique says of Garcia: “She showed me another way to live. She was the first person who believed in me, and that alone made me want to change. Her not giving up on me made me want to change.
“You know, when we are kids, we think that just because our parents don’t care, no one does. You feel worthless. But there are people out there who do care. That’s what I would tell the boys who were at (Tuesday’s) meeting. There are people who care.”
What is the difference between the young people who make it and those who don’t? I return to this question knowing there are no pat answers.
After so many years of a life unmoored, Monique moves through her days with deliberation. She takes her family to church every Sunday. She and her daughters and little brother make dinner in their tiny galley kitchen, and they sit and eat together.
I picture them at the table where I sit, passing the dishes, saying grace, talking about the day, the small gestures by which a young mother anchors herself.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-1416 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
