WNPC Orlando The Breakdown Wall
The Breakdown Wall at Doc Weston's PH occupies an alcove off the Main Street corridor near the lobby, following the mixed-language model established at the Bronx and Boston sites -- all languages on the same wall, unsorted, grief next to grief regardless of the language it is written in.
Pine Hills' Breakdown Wall carries a grief that the other WNPC walls do not hold in quite the same way. The notes are shaped by the particular exhaustion of being sick in a neighborhood that the world has decided is not worth investing in. A note reads: "They told me nothing was wrong but I couldn't walk." Another: "My son has seizures and the ER treats us like criminals." Another, in Spanish: "Tengo miedo de ir al doctor" -- I'm afraid to go to the doctor. The fear is not only of the medical system. It is of the way the medical system treats people from Pine Hills -- the assumptions that follow the zip code into the exam room, the way "Crime Hills" becomes a lens through which a patient's symptoms are read as drug-seeking, as exaggerating, as the problems of a population that chose its circumstances.
The wall holds what Pine Hills has been carrying. The clinic gives it somewhere to go.