Editors

As the spring semester winds down and preparations begin for the fall, time for change and elections are upon us. Elections for the Student Government Association and student publications took place over the past week, and the majority of these leadership positions went unopposed.

Students continue to cry out against policies and non-participation, yet no one will step up and take initiative to make a difference. Year in and year out the same individuals hold offices and positions that create a lack of diversity and change for which the campus so desperately yearns. For example, the student body president and vice president elect, John Tomasheski and David Helenski, were elected with no contest.

After the Student Communications Committee met, the rising editor-in-chief of the Marlin Chronicle, Rebecca Desjardins, and the Sandpiper yearbook editor, Matt Edwards were both elected without opposition. In one instance a position was filled merely to keep the publication alive. At a college as dynamic as ours, these positions need not only good leaders but strong staffs as well.

The feeling of apathy hangs over our campus, but the courage to take charge is lacking within our students. College provides an environment of opportunities that is hard to match. The time to make your mark on Virginia Wesleyan and the world is now. The decisions of tomorrow are made today, by people who seize the moment.

Carpe diem.

Sometimes those who seem to be the quietest, the least likely of all people to make any kind of difference in the community, are the strongest, most caring individuals. These are the people this world could only hope for in time of need. Our community is lucky to have one of these individuals among us. Harvard University will also be lucky to have her, as she will be attending their Divinity School in the fall.

I had the pleasure of meeting senior Virginia (Ginnie) Walden, 23, for the first time when she organized the September 11th Memorial Quilt, and I wanted my hall to help make some squares to put in it. The quilt turned out to have 47 squares, much more than she expected. “I wanted to respond in a constructive way, but I couldn’t go to New York because I can’t drive, I couldn’t get a bus ticket, and I am too light to give blood,” said Walden. “The quilt was a way to make space for other people to express themselves constructively.”

This is what I truly thought set Walden apart from the rest of the college. After speaking with her, I realized that the memorial quilt was minute compared with some of her other experiences and accomplishments. These accomplishments seem unlikely from Walden for two reasons. First of all, she is a small person.

“I’m gonna deal with people thinking that I’m younger than I am until I get gray hair and wrinkles,” said Walden. She is also legally blind. “I still see a lot,” said Walden. “It is quite frustrating here because I can’t drive, so I don’t get off campus much.” According to senior Sarah McQueen, however, her visual impairment has not held her back at all. “You forget that she has a disability,” said McQueen. “When she wants to do something, she just gets it together and does it.”

Apparently, she has been doing this for quite some time now. Directly after high school, Walden lived in an Ashram (a Hindu Monastery) in Buckingham, Va. for a year. She learned much about dealing with people’s differences. “It was a very diverse community,” said Walden. “I learned from all functional aspects of the community.” Along with learning how to chant a few prayers in Sanskrit, do yoga and cook vegetarian, she gained quite a bit of discipline.

Walden spent her first two years of college at Tidewater Community College. While at TCC, according to Catherine Cookson, director of the Center for the Study of Religious Freedom, she developed an interest in helping and understanding homeless people. “She felt that enough people had been telling homeless people how to be,” said Cookson. “She decided she was going to listen to the homeless people and find what the world looked like from their eyes.”

After transferring to Wesleyan, she designed a research project in order to do just that. She wrote a report on her findings of what they had to say. “Her journal alone opened my eyes about a lot of things,” said Cookson. “She wrote things like if you don’t have a place to wash up, how are you going to get a job?”

After graduating from TCC, Walden came to Virginia Wesleyan and designed her own major, Social Justice Studies. The major consists of four disciplines: political science, sociology, history and religious studies. “I designed it to be a major concerned with a liberal arts approach to social ethics,” said Walden. “The course offerings at Wesleyan in these four disciplines sort of go together because they have many similar themes.”

Along with designing her own major, she has been working as an intern with the Center for the Study of Religious Freedom to design a part of the Center’s proposed Religious Freedom Certificate. This part of the Certificate program will be called “The Experiential Learning Program.”

“The Certificate is a three-part program that will consist of academic work with religious freedom, meditation training- where people will learn conflict resolution skills- and an experiential learning program that will put students in organizations to develop first-hand knowledge of how religious conflict resolution and cooperation work,” said Walden. Walden has been working outside the college trying to help others as well. According to Chaplain Bob “Chappy” Chapman, she found inspiration from a speaker named Edwina Gateley during the 2000 Wesleyan Lectures who spoke about her ministry with prostitutes in Chicago.

“She was so impressed and moved by her, that summer she went to Chicago and worked with prostitutes on the streets of Chicago,” said Chapman. In Chicago, Walden worked at a sanctuary for women in prostitution called Genesis House. “Trained outreach workers walk the streets and let the prostitutes know about Genesis House, telling them that they are welcome there to change clothes, get food, or take a shower,” said Walden. “I spent about half my time in the office and half on the streets.”

“It’s not like ‘Pretty Woman.’ That’s not how it works,” said Walden. “One day a woman came up to us and we offered her condoms. She leaned on the outreach worker and cried on her shoulder. I saw this happen several times over the summer. These women were in incredibly desperate situations.” Because of her work with CSRF, people in need, as well as many other things involving religion, Walden was recently accepted into Harvard Divinity School. There she plans to get her Master of Divinity, a three-year seminary program, and to pursue non-ordained ministry. As a part of her studies, she will do part-time work in different settings and ministries. Of her recent acceptance she said, “There is more to life than going to Harvard. Right now I’m a proud student of Virginia Wesleyan and a proud graduate of community college.”

Cookson, who has been working extensively with Walden on the Experiential Learning Program, feels that she has quite a future ahead of her. “I think she’s at the beginning of a really interesting journey,” said Cookson, “a new phase in what has already been a really interesting journey.”

She came into the world to a drug-addicted mother. By the age of 4 she was learning about life on the streets. At 6 she moved into a crack house. By 8 she was selling drugs just to be able to buy food for herself and her little brother. Her first arrest came at 16. This is the story of a woman we’ll call Daria. “I knew I had to quit selling drugs,” she said. “I couldn’t be the one who was causing other kids to go through what I went through.”

That revelation came to Daria, now 22 and serving a 7-year sentence, when she was only 13. “I needed the money,” she said. “It was only the money, but I just couldn’t do it to the other kids anymore.” Daria knows all too well the pain that comes when someone sells drugs to a child’s mother.

“She’d leave us at the crack house for days,” she said. “If we did have any food or money, we had to sleep on it so no one would take it. Sometimes they took it anyway.” Daria was born in New York City to a mother addicted to crack cocaine. Her mother moved to Norfolk shortly thereafter. By the time she was a toddler, her mother had the family surviving on the streets.

“People don’t usually think of little girls as homeless people, but we are out there,” Daria said. Then came the crack house. Her mother, still addicted to crack and never able to keep a job more than a couple of weeks, began living in one of the crack houses that at one time littered East Ocean View in Norfolk. It was an abandoned building, subject to occasional police raids that Daria always seemed to miss.

“I used to want to get arrested, because I’d hear people talk about the food in jail,” she said. “I wanted hot food.” This was one wish of Daria’s that would come true. Eight years old and tired of being hungry all the time, Daria began selling drugs for one of the dealers who hung around the crack house. At first she made between $50 and $75 a week, delivering drugs to some clients who lived in the neighborhood.

“One time one of the crackheads brought her kids with her to pick up the drugs,” Daria said. “They were dirty and skinny just like me. I remember hating the people who gave my mother drugs.” It was then, five years after beginning her career as a drug runner, that Daria knew she had to quit. By this time, Daria’s mother had been sent to Goochland Women’s Prison to serve 15 years for various charges. Her little brother had been sent to live with a family, but Daria remained on the street.

“Sometimes I just wandered,” she said. “Sometimes I stayed at the crack house. Sometimes I got a hotel room.” It was around this time that Daria got word that her father had succumbed to AIDS. “I loved him like anyone loves their father,” she said. Daria, now barely a teenager and determined not to sell drugs anymore, began working at one of the go-go bars in Ocean View as a waitress.

“I looked 18 and no one asked me for ID,” she said. Shortly she began dancing at the club. Then she became a mother. Her daughter, now living with the father in the Midwest, inspired Daria to dream of a normal life. “I wanted to go to cosmetology school,” she said, “but I didn’t think I could do it.” Daria broke the promise she had made to herself to never sell drugs again. “I needed money.”

She was arrested a few months after making this decision. Since then her life has been a cycle of being arrested, doing a little time, promising herself she’ll get it right, and then starting the cycle again. During her current stint in the city jail, she received word that her mother, out of prison on parole, had died on the streets of Florida from a drug overdose. “She was the only person who ever really loved me,” Daria said.

Daria knows she is on the same road that her mother walked down and is trying to find the determination to change her life. “I just don’t know how,” she said. “People tell me I can do something, but I don’t think it’s true.” Daria is a tiny woman, only 4’9,” but she’s not afraid of anything. Except getting out of jail.

“I really don’t know where I’m going to go when I get out,” she said. “Everyone is sick of me. Even my grandparents don’t take my calls anymore. After what my mother put them through, I don’t blame them. “Maybe, instead of cosmetology school, I can be a social worker,” she said. “I want to help someone so they don’t have to be where I am now. “I wish someone would have helped me.”

Cindy Smith, A VWC communication major, works at Hampton Roads Regional Jail.