The View From Prospect Hill

           In this week‚Äôs edition of The Somerville News, two very different stories came out of the Winter Hill/East Somerville community. In one, 40 school age children from the Mystic Ave. Housing Development gleefully went to a Winchester dentist for a free cleaning.

In the other, four young men were arrested on Gilman St. for possessing cocaine, marijuana and a .380 caliber semiautomatic pistol. The men are believed by police to be connected with the street gang H-Block, which has roots in the Mystic Ave. homes.

Each incident provides insight into the daily life of Somerville and, in particular, its largest public housing facility.

          Every Monday night in the Learning Center‚Äôs main room, Manson Kennedy teaches the young Mystic Ave. residents the finer points of the written word when the Books of Hope program meets.

Books of Hope is a unique program designed to create self expression and advocacy through creative writing. Through literature, Mystic Ave. teens reach out to each other, to their neighbors, and to others around the world. The teenage authors from Books of Hope are involved in the publishing process from start to finish – from formulating an idea and writing and editing multiple drafts to publishing the book and selling the finished project. Since 1999, over fifty youth have produced nearly 100 books and many are writing their third and fourth works.

            At The Somerville News, we are proud to have featured the young authors of Books of Hope in our pages on a number of occasions. But we are also resigned to the fact that not every soul who walks along Mystic Ave. is so positive and we have reported on the crime and violence lurking in the neighborhood.

            In that huge, dark row of homes, Somervillians live packed into close quarters, some of them with little to eat and less to do. All the senses and imagination and sensibilities and emotions and sorrows and desires and hopes and ideas of men and women are forced in upon themselves, bound inward by an iron ring of frustration. In this huge cauldron, countless natural gifts, wisdom, love, music, science, poetry are stamped down and left to boil away, destroyed by misery and degradation, obliterated, wiped out.

            As these conditions manifest themselves in desperate crimes of violence and drug sales, it is important not to forget the other stories coming from Mystic Ave. How much harm can mug shots and criminal stories do to the perception of a neighborhood? Not too much, we hope, if the coverage is balanced by just a few of the many more positive stories that occur each day.