A 'Miracle' reaches out

Sterling Mack cracked a wide smile and laughed as he busted out old-school dance moves like the Sprinkler during the chorus of a Neil Diamond tune.

Sterling, 9, repeated the moves again and again as he and his castmates practiced "Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show," one of several songs included in the play they are performing for Second Saturday.

With each repeated lyric, the children's voices grew bolder and louder, their movements and dancing more cohesive and energized as the hours ticked by.

Sterling and many of the other children involved in Staging a Miracle – a five-week summer theater program at First United Methodist Church in midtown Sacramento – welcome this practice as a distraction from some of life's harder realities.

Of the 46 children in the program, 36 are homeless or transitioning out of homelessness.

Sterling is one of them.

He and his mother, Zizzari, moved to Sacramento from Florida about five months ago. They've been staying at a different church each week, one of several families aided by the Family Promise organization.

They've moved 24 times in the past two years, in a windfall of circumstances that included foreclosure and job loss.

"We've never been homeless before. We lived in middle-class homes," Zizzari Mack said. "Life changes just happen very quickly."

A play-by-play of Sterling's day illuminates the difference between his life and that of a typical 9-year-old boy.

"Well, I wake up at a church, then we get on a van that takes us to school," he said, referring to Mustard Seed School at Loaves & Fishes. "They let us do lots of cool stuff, sometimes yoga, roller skating, kayaking. ... Then we pack up and go home."

Home for Sterling is Family Promise's Day Center at the Loaves & Fishes complex, where he and his mom can shower, do laundry, eat dinner and play games. Then it's onto another van, to another church, for another night.

Lately, the routine has shifted three days a week to include dancing, singing, guitar, photography lessons and dinner with new friends facing similar situations. Staging a Miracle has offered a respite.

"It gives me an opportunity to be creative," Sterling said.

The program was developed as a way to give children whose parents may not have the means to pay for lessons or camps an opportunity to experience the performing arts, said Kris Errecart, one of the program's organizers.

It was patterned after the Sitar Arts Center in Washington, D.C., an education center that provides after-school, weekend and summer classes for primarily low-income children.

"The hope is that someday we might be able to have a center for the arts for kids who are underprivileged," Errecart said.

This year's production, titled "A Hand Out for Hope," is full of inspirational songs intended to invoke a sense of community in the Second Saturday crowd, said Michael Miiller, the program's director.

"The world is in kind of a funk right now, and people are really looking for something positive," he said. "It's the idea that you have two hands, and reaching out to somebody is how we'll get out of this."

Although government provides some assistance, community resources thread together much of the fabric of family life for many homeless people.

"It takes a community to raise a community," said Jennifer Jones, whose son James, 11, also is participating in the play.

Jones' participation with Women's Empowerment, a local nonprofit organization that helps homeless women find jobs and housing, led her to find a grant to go back to school to get her associate degree in human services.

Women's Empowerment also helped Zizzari Mack find permanent housing for her family. She and Sterling learned last week that they were accepted into a program for permanent housing.

They could be in their new home as soon as this week. The move could mean a homecoming for Sterling's 16-year-old brother, who has been living with relatives in Southern California because the family could not find shelter together.

The thought of a permanent home is overwhelming and exciting for Sterling.

"It means somewhere where you can have a roof over your head and you are safe," he said. "Where you can relax and not worry. It's your own."

And with that, a simple taco dinner and dessert of Oreos before play practice at the midtown church became a celebratory feast.

Source: SacBee