Something You’d Never See at UCLA
I (not Scott) was walking around East LA College, a community college in East LA with an InterVarsity chapter. I was walking through the Administration building, which was crammed with students still trying to add classes. There was a guy with a table set up from the Rose Hills Mortuary with brochures.
I didn’t have time to stop and ask this guy what he was doing on a college campus selling burial plots and coffins. It would seem like a non-sequitur, except that death is not too far from the surface for youths who grow up in East LA. At East LA College, we had a student die last year who was involved with our InterVarsity group for a while. And almost everybody on campus knows someone in their family or in the neighborhood who was killed.
When I was going to college in the tonier Westside of town, death was theoretical - something we discussed in class. If Rose Hills had set up shop there, it would have been front page news in the school paper as the target of jokes. At ELAC it’s a reminder that the stakes are high when dealing with barrio kids.