St. Elmo Village

It just changes you

“People will walk down the street and when they almost get to the property, they slow down a little bit. It just changes you. We have a pond the children built. They were five to 12 years old. They just started and it took them a year, and in that process, somebody complained to the Department of Building and Safety. And so, the [inspector] guy is walking down the driveway and he’s a little hostile, like, ‘I’m going to get these people.’ You know, child labor or whatever he’s talking about. And he saw these kids learning and working as a team and having fun and learning how to recycle water and so forth that he just — that negativity or that anger just dispersed. He wound up putting a green mark on his pad and giving a $100 donation to the workshop because negativity may enter, but what we’re doing is so organic and good that it just kind of disperses it. So that’s how we heal ourselves with what we do.”