Dear Friends,

We’ve gotten enough calls and emails from folks concerned about my state of mind for me to think it’s probably time for a more upbeat letter. If you’ve been among those worried, you can rest assured that I’m far from despair. On the contrary, I can’t remember ever feeling more alive than I have these past few years in Cincinnati, in spite of all the trouble and confusion we’ve found here. My world view surely has been shaken some, but my soul is safe and sound.

Not to boast, but, amidst our many mistakes in starting over as servants of God, it turns out that Marty and I did right the single, most important thing we had to do right: We didn’t try to do it by ourselves. If nothing else, we have learned at least on this adventure that loving people well, and loving poor people especially, is a team sport. And if I feel alive and well instead of utterly defeated, it is mainly because the other members of our somewhat intentional community here give me strength and security on a daily basis, whether or not they mean to do so.

I say ‘somewhat intentional’ to avoid giving the impression that we are some kind of religious order, with formal rules and a common purse and a weekly regimen of prayer. If you thought that, I’m afraid you’d be sorely disappointed when you came for a visit. What we are instead is a handful of families and individuals who have moved next door or around the corner from each other on purpose, so we can share our lives and our meals and our stuff more easily, and so we can all love the same neighbors without having to walk very far. We still have our own jobs and houses, but because the houses weren’t very expensive the jobs don’t take all our time, so there’s more left for each other and for the folks we’re trying to bless one way or another.

Like last week, when Marty and I weren’t sure about inviting a struggling kid who’s on his own to come live with our family, and we ran next door for Karen’s advice. Or the week before, when Karen, Ric, and Marty handled the whole Monday night dinner party because my plane home from Vancouver was delayed. Or the other night, when Sarah walked over to talk through her career options now that she knows she doesn’t want to be a massage therapist forever. Or the night after that, when Sarah offered to tutor the neighborhood girl the rest of us just couldn’t fit in.

If that kind of give and take sounds appealing to you, well, join the club. Especially for those of us with kids, it is a pure joy to have such wonderful brothers and sisters around to help raise them. And when it comes to coping with the often absurd consequences of our beloved neighbors’ bizarre combinations of poverty, neglect, and dysfunction, well, we’re all better off with plenty of partners to share the load.

Out on the road as a speaker, when people tell me they admire the sacrifice of our ‘radical’ inner-city ministry lifestyle, I can’t help but smile. If they had any idea how amazing it is to be daily surrounded by the kind of love, support, understanding, and practical help that my family literally takes for granted here, I think their admiration might turn to envy instead. After all, who else gets to live so close to their friends?

Please don’t worry. This street-level ministry stuff is indeed much harder than I remembered, mainly because I know better now what it means for a child not to have a decent parent, or for a parent not to have a decent job, or for a family not to have a decent place to live. But it is richer now, too, because I also know better the true value of love, which is our God. And because here, in that knowledge, I am not alone.

Thankfully,

Bart

Dear Friends,

I do my best with these letters, but no words can really communicate the essence of what we are doing here.  For that, you’d need Smell-O-Vision.

In case you didn’t know, Smell-O-Vision was a system developed in the 1950s that released odors during the projection of a movie so that the viewer could actually smell what was happening onscreen.  Thirty years later, cult filmmaker John Waters tried the same thing with scratch and sniff cards.  In both case, the idea was to take advantage of the scientific fact that smell is easily the strongest and most vivid of our senses when it comes to processing emotional experiences. If you’ve ever smelled something and had memories you hadn’t thought of in years come flooding back, you know what I’m talking about.

What you may not know, however, is what the scent of urine in a hallway tells you about a low-rent apartment building, or what the combination of cigarette smoke and baby formula on an infant’s blanket tells you about a family, or what cheap liquor on an addict’s early morning breath tells you about the rest of their day, or maybe the rest of their life.  These are some of the smells I’m learning these days.

I know a few already.  At the grocery store the other day, I didn’t even need to turn around, let alone ask any questions to be sure the man behind me had no house, no car, no job, and nobody looking after him.  What I needed instead was the intestinal fortitude to talk with him like a friend even though he was mentally unstable, and to offer him a ride to the soup kitchen even though it would take half a day to get his stench out of my van.

I know marijuana in the afternoon air means I’m going to have to answer a lot of bizarre theological questions from my street corner buddies Richie and Big Mike.  I know the smell of mold and too many cats means helping a friend pass her Section 8 housing inspection is going to take more than a morning, and the smell of an open electric oven means we might as well not bother because her lousy slumlord still hasn’t fixed the furnace. And, unfortunately, I know the smell of fecal matter coming out from under a dirty set of clothes means it doesn’t much matter how skillful I am as an after school tut
There are wonderful smells here too, of course – ammonia in the spotless kitchen of a single mother with two jobs, soul food in a neighborhood restaurant, talcum powder on the older church ladies, my warm house at the end of a long day – but not nearly enough to cover the others.  If you are highly sensitive in that way, like Marty, how much you can love poor people sometimes boils down to how long you can hold your breath.

There is more to it than that, though.  As I said earlier, smelling things is probably the most powerful way that we feel where we are and what we’re doing at a particular moment in time.  No wonder a hospital administrator recently told me that his boss devoted an entire staff meeting to making sure their hospital smells as clean as it is, in order to subconsciously instill confidence in their patients’ families.  For better and for worse, smells communicate things that words just can’t.

The bad smells here do not instill confidence at all.  On the contrary, what they communicate is a deep, visceral sense of neglect and decay and futility that threatens to overwhelm this whole neighborhood and our hope along with it.  So then, when I tell you that my dream is to motivate and organize folks to clean things up around here, you can rest assured I mean that quite literally.  We have plenty of souls to soothe, to be sure, but we also have bodies to bathe and clothes to wash, basements to clean out and houses to renovate. 

I know we can’t change everything in our poor little neighborhood.  Honestly, my best guess is that we can’t even change very much.  But even on my most dismal days, when the odors of brokenness around me are more than I can stand, I believe we can, at the very least, leave some places and some people around here perfumed with the sweet smells of care, healing, and hope.  After all, most of those smells are simply a matter of soap and water, and hammers and nails, and meat and potatoes.

In the meantime, since you don’t have Smell-O-Vision, or Odorama, or probably even a good Aroma Therapy kit, I guess you’ll have to take my word for it that loving poor people can be an awfully smelly business.  Then again, maybe not.  Maybe you just know a different set of smells than I do, because you are trying to love a different kind of poor people.  I hope so, because I suspect that at least part of the reason God calls us to all this smelly loving in the first place is so we aren’t completely knocked out when we’re the ones who stink.

Thanks for helping God keep us here. 

Your friend

Bart

PS.   If you would rather receive this letter by email, just drop me a line at bartcampolo@gmail.com and we’ll switch you to the email list.   

hello from the walnut hills fellowship!  for all you web-savy folks out there, please bear with us as we catch up with the technology curve.  for those of you who have visited in the past and posted a comment, well those comments are finally up for all to see.

in addition to improving our technology skills, november has us redistributing furniture from some kind neighbors to others, hunting down turkeys, and planning some fun holiday surprises for our neighbors.  we promise to try and keep up and keep you posted on our corner of the world. 

be well,

from all of us. 

Bart.

Was glad to read your update. Sounds like ya’ll are getting into all the stuff that’s real. Wanted to say, as they say around Walltown, that “I feel you” when it comes to the harsh realism about street life. But I’ve also had to learn that the tough guys in the white tees aren’t really all that different than the harsh realists who talk business down at the real estate office. True, they’re facing the reality of our neighborhood from a different angle. But they have roughly the same mix of greed and hope, fear and longing as the folks who’re trying to make a buck on a fixer-uper. (And, yes, they will shoot you in a pinch, whereas the slum lord will just evict you, cuss you out, or slam the phone down after a rant.)

One story: one of the corners where the guys hang in Walltown is just across from the school where Leah runs her after school program. Like a good mother hen, she’s protective of her flock and watches the guys like a hawk. She doesn’t want them whistling at her girls or talking to her boys. For a long time, she’d park her car, get out, walk right by the guys, and not say anything.

Then we got to know one of the guys who was getting tired of bouncing in and out of prison and wanted to try college. We knew his grandma and his aunts and, with them, we did what we could to help him out. He started eating dinner at our house every once in a while and coming by to talk. At some point I remember him saying to Leah, “We used to think you were so stuck up–parking your car and walking by us without saying anything.” He could laugh when he said it, but Leah decided to change her approach with the guys on the corner. She greets them now, knows them by name, and demands respect from them.

This past spring, one of the girls in the afterschool program who’s becoming a woman walked in and handed Leah a piece of paper with a phone number on it. She said one of the guys on the corner had handed it to her. Leah asked for a description of the guy. Then she took the paper, marched out to the corner, walked up the crowd, called the guy by name, and told him that he better not ever try to pull that again with one of her girls. “I’m sorry Ms. Leah,” he said.

He still stands on the corner, but he also talks with us when he comes by the house. We’re praying that one day he’ll decided to do something better with his life. In the meantime, he’s still part of the neighborhood–broken like all of us and hungry for love.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Bart here again, fresh off two weeks vacation and still not sure exactly how best to use this front page blog. 

Essentially, I’m wondering whether to include my personal ministry reflections in this space or to keep them over on my own blog.  After all, TWHF is more than just me.  Marty and Karen are already just as involved as me, and plenty of other friends are showing a real interest in joining up, either to live and work with us all the time or just to stop in to help out once in a while. 

Maybe this shouldn’t be the front page at all, especially if there really are no regular visitors and this website’s real audience is just those folks who hear about TWHF and want a basic understanding of what we’re doing here in Walnut Hills.  You know, the ‘About Us’ seekers.  If that’s the case, then maybe we should move ‘About Us’ up front and leave the fresh stuff for my monthly letters/emails.   

In the meantime, we Campolos are back from the beautiful, quiet, uncrowded beauty of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, refreshed and eager to get back to loving folks here.  Today I’m doing office stuff, but tomorrow I’ll hit the streets again, anxious to find out what’s been going on in the neighborhood.   I’ll let you know…I think. 

…since nobody comments.  No matter, I (and hopefully all of us working here eventually) need some place to record whats happening.  Like this:

Wednesday Marty and Karen took a family of kids for a peaceful day at the zoo…a few days later we heard those same kids screaming out of their windows as their grandmother beat one with a stick.  It’s a struggle.

Wednesday night a contractor came and told us that basement we want to make into our ministry space will cost about $10k - $15k…yikes!  Hmmm…do we go in another direction for now, or do we bite the bullet and go for it?

Thursday afternoon I shared lunch with a very cool 14 year old kid from up the street with real potential and a positive attitude…how incredibly refreshing was that?

Dinner on Thursday was very cool.  A recovering addict friend from Over the Rhine (Daryl Jackson) joined us and read some very cool poems about drugs and their consequences in a very cool way.  The biscuits and gravy were good, too.

Friday night I was summoned downstairs at about 10pm by a distraught, inebriated friend who had just been beaten up by some other women and thrown out into the street by her boyfriend.  A few hours later we had her squared away for the night, but the situation is ugly and I’m in the middle of it in a very weird way, becaue I’ve been trying to help her find a better place to live.  Now I’m praying for wisdom and hoping for a miracle.

Saturday I went to preach in a lovely, wealthy church outside of Columbes and struggled like crazy to connect my reality here with theirs in a way that would be helpful to them in their own journeys of faith. 

Gotta zoom!

So, a few weeks ago we realized two things: First, that lots of our kids had little or nothing going on this summer and, second, that we were in no position to organize a big outreach program on short notice. So, in keeping with our ’small is beautiful’ approach, we decided to pull together a week of group-building activities for about 15 of the kids we already know and love. Sort of like an in-town family vacation with a really big family.

Monday we went on a picnic to a park with a splash pool that the kids absolutely loved. We played kickball and read stories and goofed around in the water for hours. Big fun. Tuesday we did the art museum in the morning and the kids spent all afternoon outside, painting their own paintings based on what they saw. Those paintings were great, too! Wednesday we drove a few hours to a big park in Kentucky, where our friend Dan Thompson took us on great hikes over natural bridges and through creepy caves. The kids dug it and for some of them the long hike was a great accomplishment. Thursday we had our regular community dinner (with the adults) except this time we added the movie ‘Holes’ and a bunch of candy and popcorn afterwards, and Friday we finished with a serious pool party at the home of our friends the Clippards. Again, big fun.

Here’s the big thing: It wasn’t a program. We left at different times and changed plans on the fly and drove our own cars and didn’t have to discipline anybody in a way we wouldn’t have disciplined our own kids, who were part of the gang as well. The kids were relaxed because they were with people they treat like brothers and sisters anyway, there was lots of time for little chats and encouragements, and we all interacted in a way that left everyone feeling more connected. Sometimes, small really is beautiful.

Our friend Colin McCartney responded to our first letter with a  wonderful note saying he and his gang are doing the same kind of stuff in Toronto and were inspired by what’s happening here.  He followed it up a week later with this article about what is and isn’t a church that inspired us right back. 

I’ve got tons of good stories this week, but I’m not sure anyone’s found this site yet.  Holler back a comment or two and I’ll start giving the news.

OK, so it only took us a few weeks to learn how to post stuff on our own website…

During that time so many things have happened here in the neighborhood that it is hard to know where to start catching you up.  So…I won’t.  Maybe some of those stories will show up over the next few weeks, but I doubt it.  So much happens in a day here that I am beginning to understand why Jesus said not to worry about tomorrow, let alone yesterday.

Last night we had some special guests at our big dinner.  Joel Van Dyke, our old Philly friend who is now working in Guatemala with gang memebers in prison, Edwin Guzman, a no-English Nicaraguan who pastors a church of street people, and Biju Mathew, who worked with Marty and me at EAPE but now manages microloans for poor women in Chenai, India with Opportunity International, all of whom stopped in to see us on their way to other places.  They loved meeting our local friends and vice versa. 

We took prayer requests last night, among them 16 year-old Zachiah’s that God would help him get out of street life, Danny and Diana’s that their failing relationship would heal, Adam’s for the eye abrasion of his new girlfriend, and Pickett’s that he would show up at his family reunion in a truly positive, giving frame of mind. 

We also listened to little Majesty spirited acapella rendition of ‘My Girl’, which earned him a big ovation.  Bottom line:  A good time was had by all…and a lot of hugs were had by many.