2) At Clovis Community College, walkers met the team from Tremendum, a local movie production company unloading equipment for a day of filming.
3) At Clovis Community College, walkers met an organizer from Central CA Asian Pacific Women who is hosting a Hmong community event at the college today.
5) Todd Beamer Park. Walkers watched a pick up basketball game, a dog-park birthday party, and young boys inside the still-locked skate park. There were personal belongs at the bottom of one of the ramps, and the boys told us that earlier they had seen bedding and belongings, but someone came back and took them but left the trash.
6) Walkers listened to beautiful choirs practicing inside classrooms on Clovis North high school campus.
Walkers greeting a yard work crew in a neighborhood with truck and trailer full of equipment. The ‘family’ crew included a boy who was pleasantly working alongside his parents. Walkers met Norm who was stepping out of the large motorhome parked in front of his house. Norm told us they just returned from a trip.
Walkers talked about what they did not notice on this walk as compared to other Fresno walks: no smells of breakfast food, no Spanish music, no roosters crowing, no people waiting at bus stops, no church buildings (except at a distance across Willow), no people living outside (except evidence at the skate park), no abandoned shopping carts, no alleys, no dismantled cars, no graffiti, no overflowing trash, no front yard fences, no barbed wire, no front yard dogs, no barking dogs or loose dogs. Regular mindfulness walkers were amazed that we never heard loud barking with only one instance of a dog barking in the distance.
Walkers saw no homeless people or abandoned belongings, except when the boys at the skate park told us someone had been sleeping inside the skate park before they arrived. Walker wondered aloud “How are homeless people kept out of this area?” Walkers talked about Fresno attracting homeless people because Fresno offers services, and Fresno does not have extreme weather conditions.A walker commented about branches that had fallen onto city property and asked questions for consideration. Who’s responsibility is it to clean this up? Or who feels responsible? How does a community encourage people to expand their sense of responsibility beyond themselves, so we all feel responsible and take ownership for public spaces?
