Detroit Orientation Institute

Recently A and I participated in the Detroit Orientation Institute (http://www.doi.wayne.edu/) which was an absolutely amazing experience for we learned a tonne about Detroit and met some pretty amazing people.
Some of the things I learned:

1. The population of Metro Detroit is upwards of 85% black (African-American for you PC types. Although I really think this name should be changed. I'll go into that another time.), with the rest being caucasian, bengali and middle-eastern.

2. There are some pretty amazing houses in the richer areas of town.

3. The public school we visited had one science teacher who taught every student in the school (all 600+ of them) for one hour a week. She had 27 classes and no prep time! And there's no toilet paper in the school. Who runs a school with no toilet paper? Each of the class room doors is locked from the inside too.

4. There is some absolutely amazing redevelopment going on in Detroit. New loft spaces, business districts, community organizations.

5. I've never seen so many abandoned buildings in my life. Detroit's population went from 1.6 million in the Metro Detroit area in the 1940s or so to less than 1 million today, leaving a lot of unused housing to rot and decay.

6. One of the first food banks was created in Detroit and is now a model for most other foodbanks in North America. (see: Forgotten Harvest http://www.forgottenharvest.org/; Focus Hope )

7. Domestic violence is a big problem here.

8. There's a huge split between people who live on the East Side and people who live on the West side, so much so that someone told a story about two Detroiters meeting in Vietnam, discovering they were from the mid-west, from Michigan, and from Detroit. When the question arose of what side they were from, they discovered it was from opposite sides, and they WALKED AWAY FROM EACH OTHER in disgust. How bizaare!!

There's more and I'll come back to it at a later date.