[COMMENTARY] When I was first asked to cover Detroit for Michigan Messenger, I got a little uneasy. I had just moved to the city from Rochester, Michigan and was concerned that I was not qualified to be an informant on a place I didn’t know anything about. Over the past couple of months, I’ve added commentary about Detroit, and about race, but there’s a sore spot that I have been avoiding.

Something is dreadfully wrong in some of these neighborhoods.

Sometimes, what I see is so bad it’s shocking. I almost don’t want to publish this, because it will make the city seem scary and frighten people off or make current residents think I’m putting down their home city. That is certainly not my intention. I chose to move to Detroit and I don’t plan on leaving anytime soon — that speaks for itself. But as much as I’m growing to love this city, I can’t sit here in denial. I want to write about the positive things going on and all the hope that’s still alive but can’t write about hope until it’s clear what I’m hoping for, or what we need to fix and move away from.

I hate to say negative things about any place where people are living and fighting to make things better. But if these stories can reach the right ears, maybe something will change. I choose to stay. Some people don’t have a choice. And as I broadcast these tales from Detroit across the vast Internet, I’m keeping them in mind. I want to flag down help from the air, from the water, from the ground, but I’m starting to wonder: Maybe I am the help. Maybe you are, too. I just need to keep telling stories and taking pictures and writing down the bones.

Continued – 

On the drive home, I see some unsettling sights. I see a house on fire, all ablaze in the night, a house with all the windows knocked out, abandoned. I get the sense of utter abandonment, a feeling that I am in some forgotten land of which we dare not speak.

I wake up in the morning to a sound like thunder, and the whole house is shaking, I hear glass breaking and my body gets tense: Is it an earthquake? No, a house just blew up down the street, there are chunks of floorboards falling from the sky. The force of the explosion throws three children and two adults all the way to the other side of the street. They are unconscious. It’s a gas explosion, and I wonder frantically if they are alive. The sound of local news choppers circling above like vultures makes me wonder where those choppers were when the family couldn’t afford to pay the gas bill and manipulated the pipes to stay warm this winter. DTE reported after the explosion that gas had been cut off to that house months before, and it had an illegal hookup. According to the Detroit News, a four-year old was left in critical condition, but coverage of the story was short, and my neighbors said they didn’t know the family enough to contact them for a follow-up.

But I stayed living in this neighborhood after the explosion because I feel at home here. Here’s a huge garden in the back yard, it’s usually very quiet and peaceful, and I like living here over the suburbs because there is no pretension. I feel like I can be myself, eccentric and creative, and it’s my own little world. In short, I feel free from the rigid constraints of society here. I guess it reminds of a place I’ve been homesick for: Belize. It’s a hard feeling to describe.

It’s April and I am driving to the highway and I see kids are playing in the streets with worn clothing, broken fragments of wood for toys. In his backyard, a boy hits a cracking basketball with a baseball bat, over and over. I don’t think he has access to a baseball.

It’s a hot spring day; chopped fire hydrants are spraying cool water on overheated children who don’t have access to luxuries like a hose, or air conditioning. They’re running through the water and laughing. A man holding a drink in a brown paper bag stands on the corner looking on.

I see people, old and young, women and men stumbling outside the liquor stores at 1:30 a.m. and I know something’s not right. An uneasy feeling creeps across my skin at the sight of a man in the darkness walking two pit bulls toward my car. I slow down so as not to hit him, he passes, and then I realize he’s just trying to get somewhere, too. I’m not sure if I should be ashamed or relieved.

On my left, there’s a house with a clothesline in the backyard. All year round, there are socks, sheets, shirts, hanging there, drying. I am reminded of my childhood in Belize when the concept of a washer and dryer was luxurious.

I see a house that has 12 people living in it. Everyday there is someone on that porch. I wonder how they all fit into that house, I am reminded, again of Belize were crammed households were very common.

The shells of old abandoned houses and overgrown storefronts remind me of the urban decay seen in the movie “I Am Legend”. These are symptoms of a mass evacuation. Sometimes I struggle with understanding how it got like this: How did this happen? Factories closed, and the race riots scared off all the masses. That’s what they say. But how do we bring them back?

It’s a sunny morning in may and I see a man walking, and as he walks he is vomiting on himself; it’s running down the front of his worn gray T-shirt and he keeps walking, keeps vomiting, until my car overtakes and passes him and he becomes just a figure in the distance.

Maybe in those tales, I’ve just described any city’s life. I hope I am not making a spectacle of those living in poverty because this is a very serious problem. It’s true I haven’t been to a lot of major U.S. cities, but I have a feeling they’re not all like this. But I also know a lot of these problems are not unique to Detroit. This is a human problem, and poverty is a global issue.

I’m new to Detroit but I’ve been in poverty before: I’m no stranger to the Third World. The only thing is, I’m not in Belize. I’m in the land of the free, the strongest nation in the world, the United States of America.