Relay for Life helps Echo Glen teens learn to care

Young residents of Snoqualmie detention center helping others in cancer-research fundraiser

August 11, 2009 12:14 pm
A teen at Echo Glen Children’s Center in Snoqualmie beats the heat with a soak in a sprinkler during the Relay for Life. The event helps insill a sense of caring.
A teen at Echo Glen Children’s Center in Snoqualmie beats the heat with a soak in a sprinkler during the Relay for Life. The event helps insill a sense of caring.

The mercury had already pushed above 100 degrees Fahrenheit when nearly 60 teens started walking an asphalt loop on Snoqualmie Ridge. Sprinklers rained water down on the fresh-faced teenagers as they made their circuits around sun-parched grass fields. The youths were walking as part of the Relay for Life, which supports cancer research — at Echo Glen Children’s Center, a medium- and maximum-security facility run by the state’s Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration.

Relay for Life gives the inmates an opportunity to do something empathetic and acknowledge someone else’s suffering.

“We’re trying to show people we’re not that bad,” said Nate, a 15-year-old boy with shaggy brown hair. “We’re not going to be like cancer – killing people one after another.”

“We don’t want to be like that. I want to be the cancer meds,” said Ellen, emphasizing her point with her hands.

The 18-year-old girl’s bubbly, earnest personality unintentionally dominates the conversation.

Michael, a 16-year-old boy with a buzz cut, nods his head in agreement.

His goal everyday is to treat everyone around him with respect – which is what he’s learned at Echo Glen, he said. “I want to be that changed person.”

He has several more years left in his sentence, which he has spent trying to show others empathy — something he had little of before Echo Glen.

Each of the three had committed serious crimes — some violent, one leading to a death. But they were only children; they had acne like any other teenager.

Many of the juvenile offenders at Echo Glen’s come from dysfunctional families, said Jo Simpson, the center’s recreational director. “They don’t know right from wrong.”

The kids at Echo Glen can’t raise money for research like a regular Relay for Life event, but it does offer them a chance to do something for others.

“It’s more for the kids to stop for a minute, to pause and reflect and realize what people are going through,” Simpson said.

While some of the kids walk in Relay for a change in routine, most of them do it because they sincerely want to show they care, she said.

Around 130 of the facility’s 150 children participated.

“It doesn’t matter what you did — you’re here. It matters what you’re going to do,” Nate said.

• Editor’s note: The names of juvenile offenders at the Echo Glen Children’s Center have been changed to protect their privacy.