Week 5

We had a couple of emotional classes last week.  I asked the kids put themselves in their dogs paws and write a story about their lives.  Where did they come from, how did they end up in the shelter, how do they feel?  In these stories the kids tend to write their own stories.  When the girls were done writing the stories I asked them to read them out loud.  After two of the girls finished their stories A.W. raised her hand.  With tears in her eyes, because her two best friends had just read their stories, she said, "They just wrote their own stories".  The kids usually either don't notice this or they don't say anything.  When A.W. said that, several of the girls started to cry.  Then they continued reading their stories.  It was nice to see them get so emotional.  They were feeling for each other, showing the empathy and compassion they were learning from the program.  It was one of those days that when I get into my car to drive home, I break down, not because I'm sad but because I'm so happy for them, so proud of them.
In our next class the kids wrote about their experience at the Macomb County Animal Shelter.  Some were happy with what they experienced and others were disturbed.  C.A. was pretty upset.  She saw her dog, Lilly, in the kennel and realized how much the dogs must feel like them, locked up.  A.W. was upset because the moment she saw the dogs in their kennels she realized how her family must feel when they visit her at the JJC.  J was happy because Missy was barking when she saw her and J had never heard her bark before.  A.M. was upset because Casey was kennel aggressive and he seemed very upset to see any of us. 
One of the girls, K, wasn't able to join us at the shelter because she hasn't been in the JJC long enough for them to trust her to go on a field trip so she decided to write about how she feels about Bella.  She wrote how proud she is of Bella, how much Bella has learned in such a short time.  Then K wrote about how she has lost so many people in her life that she has this big hole in her heart and Bella has filled that hole.  K wrote that now that she knows that hole can be filled she will be able to let people in again and not push them away.  THIS IS A HUGE STEP, A BIG REALIZATION!!! The entire room cried when K read from her journal, the girls, the JJC staff, and myself.

This is a pic of the kennels at the shelter.  Looks a lot like a jail cell doesn't it?  It's really more like solitary confinement since most of the dogs only get out probably 15 minutes a day.