Howard Harvey, career development officer at the Leap Centre. - Ricardo Makyn/Staff Photographer
Nedburn Thaffe, Gleaner WriterGrowing up in one of Kingston's tough inner-city communities, [color:4820=blue !important][color:4820=blue !important]Howard Harvey got his 'calling' to the street from a [color:4820=blue !important][color:4820=blue !important]tender [color:4820=blue !important]age, heading a gang of rugged teenage boys who made their living skipping through traffic and wiping windscreens.
Today, his well-kept office at 155 Duke Street, decorated with certificates of [color:4820=blue !important][color:4820=blue !important]achievement, belies the life of the vulgar street youth who was a regular feature at the intersection of Hope and Waterloo roads during the 1970s and '80s.
How he ended up with a master's degree in teaching then moving on to pursue his doctorate in educational leadership was due largely to a "0.5 chance" of a lifetime that was afforded to him.
"Living in the Maxfield area, I came from a very large [color:4820=blue !important][color:4820=blue !important]family background: seven brothers and two sisters. It was difficult for my parents to finance so many of us, so this was my little hustling, which also helped to back up the family income," [color:4820=blue !important][color:4820=blue !important]Harvey recounted.
Interestingly, Harvey told The Gleaner that his main motivation to taking to the street around age 16 was because of his passion for knowledge. He wanted to stay in school, but it was difficult for his parents, who had no steady jobs, to send nine children to school.
LIMITED RESOURCES
"Textbook was an issue because my parents couldn't afford those things. So even though I wanted to do well in school, there were limitations. Sometimes I got frustrated because of the limited resources - little or no lunch money, that sort of thing.
"Because of this, I became antisocial in school - I got myself in a lot of fights, I broke people's hands, did all sorts of things to get kicked out of school, but they never kicked me out."
The career-development teacher at the HEART Trust/NTA's Learning for Earning Activity Programme (LEAP) Centre in Kingston recalled how his frustration with the financial challenges at home launched him into the streets one summer holiday.
This marked the beginning of a lengthy period on the street wiping windscreens.
On a good day, Harvey said wiping windscreens, he would take home as much as $6,000, a very attractive sum during those years for a teenager to be making.
FINDING A WAY OUT
Other than that, the streets created "a good outlet to pull yourself from the community that you are in. Crime was very heavy in the community and you wanted to make sure that you are not in that realm," he said.
"You grow up seeing killings, so you wanted to create a new environment for yourself, and that was one of the reasons why I embarked on an activity like that to get to see different things, meet new people," Harvey recounted.
"The community didn't give you much resource. For you to get something, you had to steal or do some real heavy thing, and the chances of you getting caught were great, but when you know you can make an honest living by going out to hustle, that is what really pull you, even though it was degrading."
But life in the streets also had its challenges. From running from the police to fighting for territory with boys from other communities, Harvey said he had his fair share of struggles on the streets. As hard as it might have been, he said this paled in comparison to life in the inner city. He was able to stand his ground with his clique of boys, who looked up to him.
"I was a gang leader in charge of a group of eight youngsters. I was one of the more academically incline persons in the group, so they would listen to me. We worked together as a team to evade the police, who wanted to take us to approve school.
"If we go in a bus today and I say, 'We not going to pay', they looked up to me. I had that leadership quality from a young age. In the streets, most of the controversy was with defending ourselves in terms of turf and protecting each other," he explained.