Word: pits
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...them are local kids who come here after school, but about 20 of the 100 or so regulars are homeless, often migrants drawn to Harvard Square from around the country, but almost indiscernable from their high school friends. With their mohawks, piercings, brightly colored hair, leather and studs, the pit kids are hard to miss. But Harvard students routinely walk right by them as if all that attention-getting eyeliner were so much invisible...
Then, in one fell swoop 150 Harvard students and affiliates descended silently into the pit kids' domain--their community center if you will--in order to express their moral outrage at an assault on a Harvard student that was being investigated as a hate crime. The terrible spectre of an invasion of skinheads onto campus loomed out of the dark recesses of Harvard's collective imagination. The kids with the tattooes, with the shaved heads or green hair--they were the target of the protest, they were the skinheads. Or so Harvard to all outward appearances agreed...
These incidents don't appear to be part of any ongoing hostility though. According to Sullivan, the pit kids don't begrudge Harvard students their relative wealth or opportunity. Harvard students have even worked at Bread and Jams through the First-Year Urban Program this fall. What is most prevalent is a studied separation, with students and pit kids keeping their worlds apart. Harvard students trip to class rarely acknowledging their peers learning about life the hard...
...easy for Harvard students, many of whom have overcome great obstacles in order to be accepted here, to look disparagingly at the pit kids' lifestyle and supposed "choices." What's hard is resisting the knee-jerk reaction to condemn instead of understand, to draw conclusions about character from outward appearances. There is clearly more to this story than skinheads and hate. As Sullivan said, "There are a lot of people at Harvard who want to help...but there a lot of people who want to turn their heads...
...soil at the bottom of the Tapaj?s pit is one clue to the nature of this potential catastrophe. Rain-forest trees suck moisture from as deep as 18 m beneath the fragile surface of the land. During periodic droughts, such as occurred during 1998?s El Ni?o, vegetation can rapidly deplete this groundwater, desiccating trees and turning them into potential torches...