Outcomes Offered
■ Love and care
■ Te nding to the neglected
■ Knowing how one person can make a difference
■ Knowing that kids can work together for good
■ Beauty
There is a busy street corner beside a bus station where kids change buses going to and from
school. It’s not what you would call a pretty spot. There’s a lot of noisy traffic and the nearby build-
ings are gray and unloved. In fact, it has a very uncared-for feeling about it. However, it has a patch
of beauty—a small garden plot called Pete’s Patch, because Pete created it in nine and a half minutes.
Pete is one of the kids who, for nine and a half minutes each day, waited here to change buses.
It wasn’t a fun or pleasant place to hang out. The station was noisy and smelled of gas fumes. There
was nowhere nice to walk and the patch of land next to the station was littered with trash. Maybe it
had once been a garden, but now it was an eyesore. Kids and adults had thrown their empty drink
cans there, along with burger wrappings and fried-chicken boxes. Someone had sprayed swearwords
and what Pete thought was pretty rude graffiti up the walls. No, it wasn’t a nice spot to spend nine
and a half minutes of every school day when all you wanted to do was get home. But Pete was here.
He didn’t have a choice. If he wanted to get home, this was the only way.
He felt like he was wasting his life away. There was nothing to look at, nothing to occupy his
mind or hands, and hanging around like that each day drove him crazy. He knew he couldn’t do any-
thing to change the bus company’s timetable, but, he began to think, he might be able to make his
nine and a half minutes more enjoyable for him and others.
He asked Mom for some plastic trash bags and a pair of gardening gloves. That week, he put on
the gloves and filled his nine and a half minutes each day by piling the trash into the bags.
“Hey, man, are you crazy or something?” his schoolmates teased. “What difference will it make?
Why waste your time?” They didn’t know that for Pete it was a bigger waste of time to sit doing noth-
ing.
On the weekend he asked his dad to drive down, collect the bags, and take them to the dump.
On Monday morning, the patch looked so much cleaner and nicer.
Then next week, Pete began to pull the weeds from around the old plants that had been hidden
behind the rubbish and weeds. One of his friends, as bored as Pete was with filling in nine and a half
minutes doing nothing each day, came to help. Mom and Dad came down on the weekend to col-
lect the new pile of bags, prune back the old rose bushes that no one had seen for years, and offer
some suggestions to Pete. Soon the patch was looking good, but the swearwords and rude graffiti on
the walls behind were really bugging him. They seemed to detract from what he had done.
“What can I do?” he asked his dad.
“What would you like to do?” his dad replied, bouncing the problem back to Pete.
Pete had an idea. He started to save his pocket money. He asked his dad to talk to the owner of
the building and, as soon as he got permission, he went straight to the hardware store where he spent
every cent he had saved on cans of spray paint. On the wall, he sketched a mural in chalk to cover all
the dirty graffiti and, when he started to put his cans of spray to work, more of his school friends
wanted to join in for those nine and a half minutes each day.
186 Healing Stories, Teaching Stories