A WEEK LATE….
HITCHING AND LEARNING
I began hitch-hiking out of necessity, but before long it became an obsession, and then a serious research project. It all began last fall when I took a job as an unpaid Media Advisor (really a PR person) for “No Nails Left Behind,” a small non-profit in the upper reaches of the Bronx that provides jobs for formerly incarcerated residents of the Borough.
(The organization’s name was a play on the wildly successful, much admired education program, “No Child Left Behind.”)
Basically NNLB’s workers scour construction sites for damaged nails, which they collect and then straighten out for resale. I thought it was a great story that more people should know about–and perhaps contribute to (because the income from the sales of one-used nails alone, we feared, might not be enough to keep the program operating).
The public transportation from our apartment in the upper east side of Manhattan to the northern edge of the Bronx was inadequate and time-consuming, and so I ended up taking a Lyft or Uber twice a day, five days a week. I couldn’t justify that expense, and so I decided to hitch-hike.
Standing on the corner of 79th and 3rd–for what seemed like hours–was beyond CONTINUE READING: A WEEK LATE…. | The Merrow Report