Love’s Children

For the kids at Agape Marine Education Center, ‘Mama’ Green offers hope and a heart

Photo by Meg Heckman

Wilma"Mama" Green sits in front of one of her many love letters.

By Meg Heckman, Staff Writer

Wilma “Mama” Green gets lots of love letters. They are colorful, often misspelled, and given jubilantly by the children at the Agape Marine Education Center. They cover the walls, the fax machine and the desk where Mama Green sits presiding over the center she founded six years ago.

The wall behind her is covered with snapshots of kids holding squirming fish at one of the marine-oriented field trips that lie at the core of the curriculum at Agape. The children are also schooled in history, phonics, Bible stories, health and safety, but these are merely vehicles for the underlying message of love.
“We’re trying to teach them how to love one another and be united,” said Green. “After that, everything falls into place. Love is the answer. It never fails.”

With love, Green hopes to calm the rage that resulted in the deaths of her brother and daughter, who were stabbed in separate incidents on the south side of St. Petersburg.
The center was incorporated in 1996 and provided similar services to children around 22nd Street South, near Jordan Park. Green decided to move the center to its current location at Third Street and 19th Avenue South when attendance dropped after Jordan Park was torn down.

When she signed the lease for the new building in May of 2000, everything needed to be done. It needed air conditioning, a fire alarm, shelves, some walls, furniture. Green’s own grown children helped. Church groups helped. Money ran low. It took until November for the facility to be ready to host children.
And children are everywhere at Agape: sitting, sprawling, squirming, poking the next kid over. The walls are lined with fish posters. A bank of cubbies is covered in seashells, relics of a field trip to the beach. The 18 kids are fixated on William “Coach Bull” Booher, who sits hunched at the end of the table, elbows resting on his knees, leading the group of 7- to 14-year-olds in a discussion about the Emancipation Proclamation.
“If you have knowledge, you’re not ignorant,” Booher’s baritone voice resounds through the classroom, almost drowning out the gurgle of the five fish tanks. His broad, brown hands pierce the air. “If you don’t know your history, you’re doomed to repeat it.”

Booher’s own history is riddled with gangs and gunshot wounds, and he hopes his knowledge will help the kids avoid similar fates.
These children have seen bodies lying in the alleyway across from their homes, have friends who have been arrested, beaten or robbed. Many can’t go to other, more mainstream camps because of behavior problems or a lack of transportation or money. Most come from fatherless homes and their mothers work two jobs. At 8 and 9 years old, the girls are being forced to learn about birth control, sex and protecting themselves from “strange men.”
“It just makes your heart hurt, the things they have to encounter,” said Green.

But they are children, too, who play school, play video games, and recite Bible verses. They are children who need to be loved and listened to and understood and sometimes disciplined.
The exchange happens quickly between the two boys:
“Stupid.”
“Fat tail.”
“Gap-toothed, hook-eyed punk!”
Booher sends them to “sit with Mama.” The two boys swagger defiantly across the room and then fall, defeated into the chairs by the desk.
While name-calling may be common place, Green will not tolerate it in Agape. What is simple taunting now could become “real problems” when the boys get older.
“Are you going to hang on to this anger,” she asks, shifting to less formal speech. “This is how you want to live? Fightin’and fussin’ with each other? Learn how to get along. You all Agape kids, you supposed to be getting’ along.”
The boys stare down at the their laps, squirming.
“You are all stars of the universe,” Green says, reaching her ample arms towards heaven. “You got to shine. But you can’t shine when you calling each other names.”

Everyday lessons like these are becoming harder and harder for Green to teach as she balances her roles of maternal caregiver and chief fundraiser for the facility. Funding has never been easy for the center because larger organizations get most of the grant money. The recent construction costs and rent at the new center have made the lack of regular funding worse. With the exception of the occasional donation by a local business, Agape is funded primarily by its founder.

“I do just a few heads every morning,” said Green, who has been a cosmetologist for 19 years. “And put that money away.”
Despite these efforts, just trying to make monthly rent and utility payments is often a challenge, said Cynthia Synclair, who is on the board of governors for Agape and the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce. Synclair has “adopted” Agape, finding a volunteer accountant to help organize finances and helping to get a $5,000 grant from the city to cover half of next year’s rent.

“The center fills some major gaps for children and for parents who often can’t afford other programs,” she said.
While the center does charge a $20 a month activity fee, no one has yet to pay it. Meanwhile, Green is currently trying to find funds for the $25 per child tuition for swimming lessons at local pools.

But Green doesn’t measure success by money. She measures it by the kids waiting for her when she arrives in the morning and begging to stay a little longer at the end of the day. She measures it in snapshots, hugs and love letters..

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