Continue reading »]]> Ever since I can remember, I have been a slave of the world. I have been whipped and punished every time a glimmer of light shone through my horizons. Why? Because from June 1998 through July 2009, my family was oppressed by homelessness.

I’ve slept next to the people that you see aimlessly wandering the city and I’ve ate beside the same people you see sleeping on the sidewalk. Yet when I see those people now, I see myself. We were laughed at together. We were persecuted together. We cried together. These tears were my constrained ambition leaking through my eyes.

Mine eyes have seen freedom deprived as childhood friends have been gunned down, both my father and my grandfather were sentenced to life in prison, and my great grandfather was violently murdered. They call us “at risk” youth and with each generation the “risk” becomes even greater. But where does the risk stop? It stops with me.

In fact, as my family traveled across the United States along our own underground railroad, I have discovered that seeking higher education is my Harriet Tubman. I have stayed at her side by always keeping my overall GPA above a 3.0 and interning at the Monarch School and the San Diego Workforce Partnership.

These experiences have been essential for me to learn how to become an entrepreneur and one day help the battle to abolish homelessness. While it may be true that I was born “at risk” under extreme bondage with homelessness as my oppressor, I am determined to march to college this fall as a free man.

Michael Gaulden
Reality Changers Class of 2010

Continue reading »]]> If I could change one thing about my community, I would increase the number of programs available to youth in order to help motivate them and guide them towards holding themselves to a higher standard and aspiring towards a college degree.

Growing up in an environment that lacked motivational guidance made it difficult for me to succeed academically. My mother was never around to remind me of the importance of simply doing my homework because she hardly received a break from her endless workday. A single mother, she sustained our family on a meager annual income of less than $8,000, yet I was not going to hold our economic status or her absence as an excuse for failure. Although I managed to acknowledge the opportunities available to me, at the same time I noticed how my friends in the neighborhood were not. After encouraging them to excel in school, I did not understand the reasoning for their growing attitudes of passiveness and low self-esteem as they quickly became enveloped in a life of organized violence and narcotics.

Supportive and motivational programs that inspire students to seek out their own path to college, meanwhile, are vital to the productive growth of a college-bound adolescent. Programs where support is always prominent will help them feel that higher education is in their reach. Reality Changers exemplifies such a program. It acknowledges the importance of early college preparation and motivates students to reach their full academic potential. If more students had access to programs like these, their attitudes would definitely be shaped for the better.

Many teenagers view themselves as destined to be unsuccessful due to the social stigmas that resonate through my neighborhood. The result is a growing passivity and a fear of failure. If the students in my community gain access to programs that will revamp their self-confidence and acknowledge their talents and abilities, a new view of themselves can be molded. Peer Mediation is another program that addresses these issues by conversational motivation and resolve. Family and social life issues present in my community deter students from progress, especially when guidance is not available, but as a Peer Mediator, I provide a social bumper that helps students jump the hurdles present in my low-income, inner-city community.

The environment in which youths are raised should nourish their growth, not squelch it. A union amongst adolescents is essential to building strong social values but is something completely lacking in my community. Youth Groups and school clubs bring teenagers together and help them mature and thus, prepare them for college life.

If students had more access to programs that could foster their potential and help them realize it, success would become more prominent in my community instead of that negative social stigma that hinders students’ evolution. I hope to one day see those in my community take full advantage of the programs made available to them in order to demonstrate, as I have proved, that educational success is possible, no matter what obstacles they face.

Jesse Sanchez
Reality Changers Class of 2009

Continue reading »]]> I should be a child soldier right now. I could have been owned by someone. I would have been forced to fight other children just to spare my life. I would have never been to the United States, gone to school, and learned English. I could have just given up, but ever since my birth at 30,000 feet above the earth, I have continued to defy gravity.

After I was born on an airplane overlooking the northeastern African Plains, my father and I lived peacefully in Aswan, Egypt. When I was six years old, however, my grandfather living in Somalia was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness and we travelled to see him. During our stay, my father and I were shopping in a nearby market when an Al Qaeda-sponsored militia began shooting many people, including my father. Within the next three days, after a brave battle to heal from his five bullets wounds, my father passed away just a few hours after my grandfather succumbed to his illness. Overwhelmed with emotions, in an instant my world was turned completely upside down. I went from living in a beautiful fishing town to being lost in a country overrun with poverty, famine, and terrorism. Fatherless, my six-year-old mind set out to achieve the unthinkable: travel 2,000 miles back home to Egypt by bus and on foot. During that journey, I was kidnapped by rebels to serve them as a child soldier. Just a few days before I was supposed to be injected with heroin to become an addict and therefore serve at the will of the leaders of the child slave trade, a friend and I were able to escape our oppressors. I was able to help my friend successfully find her home. In return, her grateful family drove me back to Egypt two years after I had originally departed.

I was overjoyed to return to my native country, but being home meant living all by myself in my father’s empty mud-block house at the age of eight. Another two years passed and I was informed that my long-absent mother was staying in nearby Cairo. As I was interested in meeting her, I left to meet her for the first time, but she wasn’t so anxious about meeting me. Upon my arrival, she said that in order to live with her I would have to support her and her children and so I did. Out of the blue, she then decided to go to America to live near her family in San Diego and brought me along. At the time, I spoke Arabic and Somali, so I figured that I could find people in America that spoke these languages and I would be fine, but almost immediately I was introduced to a whole new culture, language, and law. I finally began to attend school for the first time at the age of ten and although it was difficult, I loved being in school and from this young age I realized the importance of education and how it leads to success.

During my first year of high school, I met my high school sweetheart and became a Christian, neither of which could ever be tolerated in a Muslim family. As a result, my mother kicked me out of her home and- while in a much safer territory than Somalia- I soon found myself in yet another familiar situation: on my own again. At fifteen years old, I could have easily broke down and dropped out of school, joined a gang, done drugs, or been thrown in jail. Instead, I chose the road not often taken and never desired; I started living in teen shelters and in the homes of close friends for periods of two weeks to four months. I also started to work to pay rent and buy food and a bus pass to go to school. Throughout this hardship, I stayed in school and maintained a 3.67 G.P.A.

Today, I am not a child soldier, but a soldier for education. I am not a slave, but free from limitations. And I am not illiterate, but fluent in three cultures from three different corners of the world. I experienced physical and emotional pain, hard work, perseverance, honor, and respect before I learned the ABC’s. For me, defying gravity means to go above and beyond what an average person would do in certain unbearable situations and I continue to defy gravity by transcending all of the horrible incidents in my life.

Looking forward, I am my own father, I am my own mother, and I am my own grandfather. I am no longer in the land of my forefathers that dictated what happened to me. Instead, I am in the United States of America where one day I will be able to shape the bright futures of my children and grandchildren.

Kasim Hussein
Reality Changers Class of 2011

Continue reading »]]> Good writers often say that the key to writing is “putting the readers in your shoes.” However, growing up in a small impoverished town in Ethiopia, I did not have any shoes in which to put the reader until I was eleven years old. From the ages of five to eleven, I walked to school for more than two hours every morning and every evening with problems around every corner. It did not matter whether the soles of my bare feet peeled off on the dirt roads of the countryside, melted on the hot asphalt of the city, or endured the numbing cold of winter. That did not stop me from walking to school. I faced teenage bullies and homeless thugs every day, but they did not stop me from going to school, either. I had to cross a bridge that was supported by three old logs with a deadly river lurking 30 feet below, and each time people crossed this particular bridge, they risked their lives and limbs, but not even those logs could stop me from striving for my education. In fact, witnessing these daily obstacles gave me even more reasons to go to school.

Before grabbing my worn out notebooks, each morning I would put on my ragged clothes that were bought during the last holiday. These clothes had been passed down from far-off lands and, as the months passed, I seemingly had a new patch for every new week. Once at school, I felt safe, yet nonetheless I would have to learn each lesson while sitting on the floor with only my lap as a table. For lunch, my siblings and I shared a small container of Injera with a sauce called Wot. These struggles have inspired me to help others who are still as barefoot as I was and fight for a change.

I understand the financial and health impacts of not having an education because my mother dropped out of school at sixth grade and my father did not go to school at all. When I was five years old, my father fled Ethiopia due to political issues and, as my mother cannot read or write, my brothers and I would always read my father’s letters for her. Without my father, our only source of income was gone until he would send us a meager 50 birr from the shantytown in Kenya where he then worked.

The first time that armed soldiers brutally stormed through my house looking for my newly-absent father – discovering even just an anti-government newspaper would mean jail for life – my mother’s health became very poor, with her epilepsy soon turning her migraines into seizures about every two weeks. I took care of my mother when I came back from school because her kids were the only doctors that she could afford. By age eight, holidays now passed with a humble meal and no new clothes, and I began selling bags to buy my own clothing and other necessities for my family.

Five years ago, my father reunited us in the United States and now my dream is to finish college successfully and one day open schools in impoverished countries. Through my adversities and seeing other people suffer, I have realized the importance of education and helping those who are in need. Many children living in third-world countries lack many important necessities, such as having an ambulance to get them to hospitals, suffering from diseases due to dirty water, and most importantly, missing parental supervision and care. These children end up on the streets because there are no organizations to provide them with housing, clothing, education and food. The key to solving these problems is equipping these young people with a proper education, and, based on what I have endured, my dream is to set up an organization that would build schools and provide homeless orphans with the means to graduate from high school with shoes on their feet, clothes with no patches, lunchboxes filled with nourishment, and medicine in their cabinets.

While it may be true that good writers put readers in their shoes, my dreams and aspirations are to put orphans in shoes that can help them cross educational bridges with hope in their heart and knowledge and success in their minds.

Continue reading »]]> After putting on my leotard for ballet practice, my mom and I always walk towards our car together. Each time before opening the door, I run my fingers through the bullet holes that pepper a path along the side of my family’s car. This reminds me of the night when I was awakened suddenly as I heard my dad scream with alarm, “¡No se levanten! ¡No se levanten!” (Don’t stand up!) I heard the reverberating echoes of the gang members’ gunshots and I knew in an instant that we had just survived another drive-by shooting.

I live in two contrasting worlds of dueling realities. I have been blessed with a caring family that tries to keep me involved in activities that will expand my knowledge in different areas such as ballet and jazz, but we also have lived next door to gang members for eleven years. Sometimes, the rival gang members of my neighbors miss their target, and on this particular occasion, four bullets had hit my family’s car. Due to the constant presence of violent criminals in my neighborhood, I can never relax and must be alertly aware of my surroundings every time I step out of my house. I can still remember how each afternoon that I wore my white leotard as a little girl, I pretended that it was my very own bullet proof vest.

My passion for dancing has been the source of my escape since I was seven years old as I quickly discovered how I could transform the negative feelings from my neighborhood into a striking performance. When I take the stage, I motivate myself to kick higher in a grand battement, kicking away an unhealthy lifestyle. I imagine jumping higher in a cabriole, reaching for the four-year college degree that I will attain. And as I pirouette across the stage, I get a 360-degree glimpse of the world that surrounds me without losing the focus point towards which I am moving.  My audience has no idea about the environment surrounding my house, but my hope is that my resilience will show through in each of my performances.

Looking back, those same bullet holes that remain on the side of my family’s car still serve as a constant reminder that I cannot continue to live in this manner and that I must excel in academics to improve my family’s economic situation. As I approach adulthood, I can no longer pretend to shield myself with a white leotard as I attempted to do as a child, but instead I will envelope myself with the protection provided by education’s cloak of knowledge. I cannot wait for my mom and me to walk towards the entrance of the university that I will attend and to run my fingers through the textbooks that will fill my brain with new found understanding during the following four years.

Better yet, I cannot wait for my college graduation where, instead of my father telling us to duck for cover, he will scream with pride, “Stand up! Stand up!” And when I hear the reverberating echoes of my family’s applause at my commencement ceremony, I will know in that instant that I have just become a first generation college graduate.

Jennifer Morales
Reality Changers Class of 2010