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Lead by Example
09/01/2006
An Interview With Zendra and Jacques
On Raising Kids In a Crazy World
By Sam Schwartz, Dan Murphy and Anthony Smyrski
Photography by Dan Murphy and Chris Crisman
Megawords: How did you decide to get married and have children?
Jacques: We never actually had a ceremony. But how decided to stick together has been working itself out. While we were in the early stages of the relationship, we went through things like everybody, breakups and makeups. We stared having children kind of early. I was 21 and you were 20, right?
Zendra: Right, when Yismael was born. The turning point, when we knew we could make it work, was when we went to St. Croix.
Jacques: We were three children deep but we were still kind of back and forth. When you have family in the area it’s easy to get away to other peoples’ houses when you’re having difficulties. But after 9-11, we decided we needed some balance. We needed to get away.
Megawords: Why?
Jacques: We were watching how the government was tripping. Things were getting so involved, we figured we’d get out of it for a bit, while we could.
Zendra: Down there all we had was each other. We had to work things out. It was the kind of challenge we needed. We got stronger.
Megawords: How have you raised your children?
Jacques: We’ve been raising our children with a focus on keeping a natural vibe, a natural way. It started with childbirth. Yismel, Shiloh and Lotus, the oldest three, were born in the hospital.
Zendra: A lot of the things we do you might call grassroots, or natural. Nile was born at home with a midwife and naturopathic doctor. Ibis was born with just us two there. It took a little studying but that was our fifth, we’d been through it, we’d watched others do it.
Jacques: When you ask how we got together, everybody’s into their own style but when you find a chick that’s into what you’re doing ... in those later years of high school we were into the same things. I was raised Catholic but in high school I started looking for my own religious spiritual thing, something that suited me.
Megawords: What did you find?
Jacques: Nothing in particular, really. What I realized is that organized religion in general was not my thing. But there are tenants of each school that I found, like keeping a Sabbath and a hygienic prayer schedule. We’re not rigorous, but we try to hold a Sabbath. We relax and try to keep a prayerful, meditative mindstate and do as little dealing with the world as possible.
Megawords: Do you have any specific prohibitions on the Sabbath?
Jacques: Nah, nah. I’m not really strict with it. If I get a call and got to go drive a car, I’m not going to not drive a car. But we do try as often as possible to observe it. Same things with the kids—there’s a focus on natural, but there are a lot of things around us that aren’t. We don’t try to be too strict. Now if we were down in St. Croix or Costa Rica living in an ecovillage, it would be easier for us to do more, but here in the city it’s so expensive. It’s almost more expensive to try and live this way. It’s so paradoxical and crazy, but in this system, in the urban environment, everything’s against you. It’s so complex to try and simplify.
Megawords: That’s why kids buy Rap Snacks and Coke instead of groceries. It’s what’s cheap and what’s there.
Jacques: Exactly. And here we are, sitting with our Capri Suns. I was taking out the trash the other day and realized it was all going to into landfill. Now we wanted to get biodegradable diapers, but right now we got the disposables. I’m not worried about the poop and pee—that’s probably the best stuff for the environment from a baby, but all that gel or whatever the hell they got in them things ... I’m bringing this trash to the curb, and it ain’t that much and I’m thinking ... well, I’ve never lived in a rowhome before. This is my first time. Every time we do something around here, I just calculate this corner, and then across the street, then times 100, then times over the neighborhood or the city or more, and I’m like, this is crazy. How they got us paying for the gas, electricity, telephone. They got everyone doing the same thing with the trash. I wouldn’t want to put this stuff into nature no matter where I was, but today it’s going to be everybody, at least on this block. At least this much, if not more. We got one bag, some people got three or four. So I’m like damn, this is crazy.
Megawords: What is Germantown like?
Jacques: I grew up eating meat and living in a normal way, for the most part. Germantown is very culturally mixed. My parents and the people on our block encouraged diversity, and I benefited from that. My dad ran the Center for Social Policy at Temple, so there’d be all kinds of people coming through. Big time United Nations dudes from Uganda and Ethiopia would stay at our house and just hang out. I wasn’t always included in the discussions, but I got to observe. I guess I got a wider range of experience than some of the same people my age. I was blessed with meeting so many types of people.
Megawords: What kinds of things do you do that you’d feel good about if they were multiplied across the block or the city?
Jacques: Things like composting, recycling, conserving water. We try and bathe people all at one time. We take quick showers and try to turn the water off while we’re soaping up, and then turn it back on again when we rinse. We don’t do as much as I’d like. Part of that has to do with us renting, rather than owning. If we owned, we could do more gardening, put in a water catchment, stuff like that.
Megawords: Why did you decide to school your kids at home?
Jacques: We’d been talking about home birth and home schooling before we even had children. We’d read books on homeschooling. I was searching to get away from the church and towards natural religion. I didn’t want a nature-based religion necessarily, but I wanted to get to the roots of things.
Megawords: You’ve repeatedly said you’re flexible, not strict. You’re always like “I don’t want to come off like I’m telling other people how to live, but this is what works for me.” A lot of people who live differently are angry. They react to what’s out there and then they go to the other extreme. It takes a lot of strength to constantly be confronted by all the infuriating and frustrating things in the world, make a conscious effort to resist them, and yet somehow not wind up enslaved by anger.
Jacques: I’ve had my times when I’ve been militant about it.
Zendra: As you mature, well, we don’t want to get more conservative, but we want to be more inclusive because you know so many people.
Megawords: You start to think about what’s psychically sustainable over the longer term. It takes a lot of energy to be a jerk and you can only do it for so long.
Jacques: It does, yeah. It’s draining.
Zendra: I think we almost gave up on it more than once. We were like “Forget it.”
Jacques: At times we’ve tried to forcibly push people in what we thought was the right direction.
Zendra: We would really dis’ the way they were doing things.
Megawords: But you start to push on people and pretty soon they start to push back.
Zendra: Yup. They do.
Jacques: Look, everyone’s going to do stuff in their own time. Like I been saying, what works for us is not what works for everybody. I realized this in St. Croix. At one point I was managing a pizza spot, serving food. They had regular pizza and a lunch buffet behind the counter. They had some vegetarian stuff, but nothing was vegan. When I got in there I started making vegan pies, just to give people that option, and to give myself the option of eating at work. Really, I was making these pies as a test. I was like, let’s see if these Rastas will take the vegan option once they have it. When people didn’t take it I would scowl, not on my face but in my mind. I was like “this motherfucker wants some pork!” But then one day I had this major realization. I was in the middle of serving a pork chop, and I was like “Why am I so hateful while I’m serving this, just because I think there’s a better way? This person could the Christ manifested in front of me, and I’m standing here mad at them because they asked me for a pork chop platter!” I could have cut myself off from a natural kind of living discussion about high spiritual moral matters, all because I judged them so quickly.
Zendra: Who do I think I am? Am I perfect? No.
Jacques: I realized that I got just as many faults as anybody out there. They’re just different.
Megawords: Sort of like trees in the wind. If you don’t bend a little bit you get pushed over.
Jacques: Yeah, we’ve come very close to snapping point.
Megawords: So where do you get your strength from?
Jacques: That’s a good question. Some of it is the block community. Some of it is this larger community of like minded people, who we know are out there.
Zendra: Some of it is our own research and just knowing that there are other people out there. Also the music we listen to: Roots, reggae music.
Megawords: Where are you seeing evidence of others choosing to live the way you choose to live?
Zendra: When we wanted to do a home birth, for instance, I could order a home birthing kid online. And I saw a lot of other people discussing their own home births in forums. There was a lot of information out there. I was like, “there are people out there doing this.”
Jacques: But people in the business still don’t approve. The midwives are not cool with it.
Zendra: Not all of them. It’s certain ones. Some want a more natural way but are still in the system. Some are on the other side.
Megawords: It’s tough because you’re telling them that you don’t need their profession. It’s like telling a $150-an-hour psychiatrist that they’re too expensive, that you just want to see them once. They’ll tell you you’ve got too many problems to even start to deal with in one session.
Jacques: The same thing happened to me! They’re charging me $100 for half an hour and I’m like, “I want to know something about me right now.”
Megawords: Not to go off on psychiatrists, but it’s like you were saying with the diapers. You spend so much time in this society fortifying yourself against salesmen, and then the psychiatrist gets you into this incredibly vulnerable place, and then at the end of the session they’re like, “Okay, when’s the next appointment?”
Zendra: They’re like, “We gotta take care of this part of this.”
Jacques: Yeah. It’s not about the money, but we gotta do it.
Zendra: Another thing that bothers me about all this alternative spirituality stuff is that it all costs a lot of money. It costs like $1,200 to go to a two-day retreat at a sweat lodge. I’m like, isn’t spirituality free? Or do I have to pay for that too now?
Megawords: But there are also those beautiful situations, such as the restaurant your neighbor runs out of his kitchen, where money is changing hands but money isn’t the bottom level of the transaction.
Jacques: That’s what so great about the whole bazaar thing and making our own products. It lets us give money to each other. That’s where we draw our strength from. I’ll spend money on my boy’s products but I’ll borrow things too, just hold jewelry pieces here at the house.
Zendra: We’re so in support of these people who are trying to do something along the same lines of where we’re coming from that we’ll do what it takes to give them that strength, so they can keep doing it.
Jacques: We’ve been talking about how we need a credit union. My mom used to work for a credit union here in Germantown. It was the only institution in the neighborhood lending to people in the community. Today there are banks all over Germantown, but they won’t give you a loan for less than $15,000. My man wants to start his business and build himself up and they can’t help. All he needs is a few dollars. You can’t start a little thing and build yourself up. You need to build yourself up and then start your thing, and for a lot of people it doesn’t work like that. If you want to do something good and small, the bank can’t help you. Now we’re putting our money into institutions that aren’t even willing to lend it back to us. They’re making money off our money when we should be making money off our money. They’re piling all that money in and keeping the interest on it when we could be sitting there and putting the interest into a community project or an insurance plan. Insurance companies, they’re the worst. What happens when we want to go see a naturopathic doctor? We got to pay out of pocket, even though we’re already paying for health insurance.
Megawords: Last year I got into a motorcycle accident in Bangkok. I had to get stitches, an XRay, a trip to the hospital in an ambulance. The bill was $150. I got the same quality of treatment in a completely clean, modern hospital for maybe ten percent of what it would have cost here.
Zendra: To just go and deliver a baby is about $6,000. All they do is stand there, watch and say “push.” I’m doing all the work and I have to pay for it. Half the time I didn’t even see a doctor until after the baby was born. They check a couple boxes on the clipboard and say “okay, you’re alright.”
Jacques: I was 21 at the time. I thought it was such bullshit. This baby’s coming into the world, and you just want to run him through this process.
Zendra: As soon as they come out they print their foot, give them shots, put all this antibiotic in their eyes. It’s horrifying.
Jacques: They come out of the womb with what’s probably the cleanest substance in the whole world all over them, the placenta from a completely sterile environment where they’ve been for the last nine
months, something that hasn’t been touched by any outside germs or dirt ... and then the first thing they do is scrub it right off. It’s a protector to keep them warm. We left it on this one and that one when they were born, and it just falls off.
Megawords: What are your opinions of society at large right now?
Jacques: The West, where we live, is very consumer based and wasteful. For the most part we’re unconscious about what we’re doing to our environment. I don’t just mean nature, I mean the people around us. Most people around are quite unconscious about how they interact with other people. People just don’t exchange kind words. All it takes is talking to people right. There’s this Asian food place my friend goes to, and they love her because she’s not nasty to them like everyone else. And they reciprocate. We get into this wasteful consumer thing every holiday: Christmas, Easter, birthdays. We don’t want to hurt nobody’s feelings but we don’t have so much space. The plastic don’t disintegrate and turn to dust and go away. You give us all these plastic toys that the next day are broken. Or they’re missing a piece. Or the kids don’t pay no attention. Kids’ll play with a stick if you give it to them.
Megawords: Just put a bow on it, paint it red and call it the Stick Toy.
Zendra: Exactly ... new toys? We don’t want it.
Jacques: It’s comical how simple it is. It’s so neat. Kids are so imaginative and inventive that they can turn anything into a toy.
Megawords: That fosters their part of the brain—
Zendra: —to create!
Jacques: Right! But when the figure looks exactly like the movie, which looks exactly like the TV show, which looks exactly the book, they lose that imagination!
Megawords: It takes away their ability to project ...
Jacques: And then what they do is, they play the story that they saw on TV. They don’t imagine their own story. It’s kind of defeatist. If we’re trying to raise the greatest children the earth has ever seen, than to give them these constraints is kind of backwards.
Zendra: Not only that, but it was most likely created by somebody who said “we can make money off this.” Someone who said, “let’s make this character.”
Megawords: And then put it on fifty different things, like Batman in ‘93 or ‘94. You license it to the cereal company the DVD company, the sneaker company, the backpack company, put it on every little thing.
Zendra: It’s not like: “This is a great character.” It’s like: This is going to make money.
Jacques: No one thinks to ask, “How can we embody all the good morals and lessons we’re trying to teach these children?”
Zendra: It’s just there to suck money out of people.
Jacques: So, in a sense, we have to develop all of those products for ourselves. This is the focus of these bazaar events. The last one we had was for Valentines, so it had a pampering kind of theme. I got a friend that does jewelry, a friend that does candles, incense, oils, music, someone who does massage. My friend who does food caters the whole jawn. Whatever products we can make, I want people to start banging them out and doing things together. Zendra makes jewelry. I’m in the middle of producing a couple of drinks, a punch, a few different tonics, and a green food one. We want to be making everything as much as we can. We’re going to have to start to produce for ourselves.
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