Journalism intern gains experience and exposure

Until this summer, I didn't know Baltimore. I didn't know that on 28th Street, only 10 minutes away from Homewood, extended families live in cramped, dilapidated row houses. I didn't know that the dugouts of baseball fields often serve as homes for Baltimore's homeless.

And I didn't know that some Baltimoreans see City Hall as a white administration for a black city.

But I didn't see its beauty either -- the skyline from a sailboat in the harbor, Hampden in a photograph taken by a 13-year-old who just wants his neighborhood to be cleaner and toddlers playing in the unmowed grass of Patterson Park, an urban park on its way to renewal.

This summer, as an intern for the Baltimore Sun, I didn't just learn about journalism -- I learned about Baltimore, about a city and its people haunted by a great past and barely making ends meet today.

My internship, the newspaper, the editors and the people I wrote about showed me that there's so much more to this city than Hopkins students ever imagine.

Like most Hopkins students, I had never heard of the Jones Falls even though it's only a short drive from campus. Then in early June, a boy drowned in its polluted waters, and I was assigned the story. When I couldn't reach his family by phone, I had to venture out to his home to interview them.

I remember driving onto a small alley off 28th Street, less than a mile away from Homewood. A woman in her "40s, shabbily dressed in faded, torn sweat pants, hollered at an assortment of children -- ages three, six, and 10, I would guess -- playing in the alley.

I'm the boy's godmother, she said when I asked her about the boy who had drowned. I can't believe he's gone, she said. I can't believe the city's done nothing about it.

She sent me to another house to meet a friend who had watched, helpless, as the boy drowned. I was finally someone who was interested, and the family hurried me into their front room, sitting in a semi-circle around me -- two older women in their "40s, the boy's 17-year-old friend and several young children.

We're upset, we're angry, said the friend's mother. A boy has died and the city's done nothing about it. They should put up a fence or signs around the Jones Falls.

If it had been a richer boy, said the other woman, they would have done something. This city don't care about poor, black people.

I listened, thinking all the while that I could probably see the roof of the Dell House from her porch.

Further away, in East Baltimore, I covered a press conference where Mayor Martin O'Malley -- wearing an orange, ghostbuster-like getup -- removed graffiti to tout his administration's fight against graffiti in the city.

At first, besides the well-dressed entourage of reporters and staff members clustered around the mayor, the shabby street was unnaturally empty, except for a plastic bag rolling across the cigarette-butt littered street as if it was Baltimore's version of the Wild West.

Then, area residents gathered around to watch the performance -- and I was struck by the divide in race.

A woman, her voice loud, harsh and belligerent, began to heckle the mayor.

We have trash and rats in our alley, and you talk about graffiti, she ranted, alarming the mayor's press secretaries. We don't care about the graffiti -- we want the trash picked up!

The mayor's staff members hurried over to pacify her and allay any scene in front of the press.

I saw Brooklyn too -- not Brooklyn, New York, but Brooklyn Park in South Baltimore. An infant, left inside by his parents as they smoked on the front porch, was mauled and killed by the family's pit bull.

The small, residential street was roped off by yellow tape. Maybe five or six police gathered in circles to discuss the incident while the neighbors gathered on their front porches to gossip and wonder. Meanwhile, the dog's carcass -- shot repeatedly by police after the dog killed the infant and escaped the house -- attracted flies in the middle of the road.

Three teenaged girls barged over to the yellow tape where a crowd of neighbors watched the scene in curiosity and shock.

He's still in the street! They left the God damn dog still in the street, cried one girl. Oh, he's dead, how could they kill him? They should have killed the mother too.

Aghast, one of the neighbors said, It killed the baby.

Shut up, bitch, the teen girl cried. The baby's my niece -- I know what happened.

She stalked off, cursing and half-crying about the dead dog.

The woman turned to me, her faced blanched, disgusted: This neighborhood has really gone down, she said. It used to be nice -- I don't know what happened.

I saw so much of Baltimore, so many places and people that changed my view of life -- not just life in general, but the standard of my own life too. Sometimes I forget that one of the reasons I entered journalism was to help people, instead caught up in my own selfish ambitions.

This summer, at the Sun, I realized that it's not the front page that matters but how I can help people, and this city in particular.

I saw so much hope in Baltimore too. I met a man who has trudged to work at a pharmacy for more than 76 years, even plodding through blizzards to show up for work. When I asked him why he kept coming, he looked surprised: That's just what people do, he said.

He told me, in the disjointed sentences of a 90-year-old man, that people in Baltimore used to help each other, that they weren't always so afraid. Innocently blinking his brown, Bambi-like eyes, he said random people would offer him rides in their cars when he was young, and that people were always "nice:" That's just what people did, he said.

I remember the teenagers who were campaigning for Andrey Bundley, a high-school principal running for mayor.

They were piecing together Bundley campaign signs when I asked one boy, who had said he didn't like politics, why he was helping his principal.

If he could turn around our high school, the boy said, then he can turn around the city.

There was only so much I could do as a summer intern -- I wasn't at the newspaper long enough to help Baltimore or to even see much of it in depth. But I did learn that I had been wrong about journalism.

I had started the internship closed minded and insistent that I only wanted to write about politics. But during the summer, I learned that the best stories are in the people, that I couldn't know Baltimore from its politicians or businessmen. Baltimore is the neighborhood association revitalizing Patterson Park, the young student photographers capturing Baltimore in black and white rolls of films, and the elderly man who keeps going to work because that's what people do.

That's Baltimore: its people.