Living in the ghetto

I was born when we were still living in our old ghetto neighborhood. Our house was one of the worst house I have ever seen. The front lawn was never green; only yellow grass and patches of dried up dirt. Our house gutter had big holes where bee’s, cats, and birds lived in there. Cats were having babies in our roof. We could hear the little kitties cry at night in the living room. Birds were making nest in the corner of our roof. We could hear their babies chirp at night in my sister’s room. On the side roof or our porch, we had yellow jackets making a hive in a big hole in the roof.

We had to sleep with our grand-parents. And by we, I mean six boys in a small room with two adults. Can you imagine how cramp, stuffy, and hard that is? There were only one twin bed and a bunk bed. There was three other rooms; One was for my parents, the other was for my five sisters, and the third one, my mom use it for storage because it was connected to the backyard door. We only had one A/C in our living room, and it was an old warn out A/C. In the hot blazing summer, we had to sleep in rows to get the cool air coming from the A/C because it wasn’t powerful enough to cool down the whole living room. It was so hot in our living room that even mosquito’s dried up at the corner of the room.

My grandmother had a little farm growing in the backyard. She planted seeds like sugarcane, corns, green onion, and stuff like that. We had an apple tree, and two other big huge trees that I had forgotten their names. One of the big huge tree was next to our kitchen window, so we use to climb that tree all the time. We use to go and play tag on the roof using the big huge tree as a ladder to get up the roof. It was fun jumping up and down from the roof to the old fridge and oven outside our bathroom. We also played basketball in our backyard with our homemade basketball rim. It was made out of a big wooden board, and a bicycle rim. We nailed the rim to the wooden board, then nailed the board to the roof. It was pretty good considering that we made it from scratch. It lasted for about a good ten whole years.

The comes the chickens. My family loves chickens, but I never really did come to like it that much. We built a pretty decent chicken far. It was about the length of our house, and a bout four to five feet high. We had many roosters in our chicken farm. We breed them as a hobby, for fighting, and eating. We also build a pigeon house. It was about six feet long and seven feet high. We had about nine chickens, and about thirteen pigeons in our backyard.

Our backyard was very big. We had half a basketball court, a volleyball/badminton court, a chicken farm, a pigeon house, and my grandmothers gardens with three trees. In the back right of our backyard, we had a huge pile of garbage that has been there since the day I can remember. I don’t know exactly how it got there, but it was about ten feet high, and about an estimate of one hundred pounds of garbage. It was horrible but I learned to live with it.

Our neighborhood wasn’t as ghetto as us, but it was still ghetto. There was drive-by’s shooting every night around our neighborhood, and we lived two house away from a wide open field, near Vanbarian Elementary School. Our street did not have any sidewalk. We had to walk in the ditches. We lived in a neighborhood where we was surrounded by Mexicans, but down the street lived many hmong families. Out community got along very well, but sometimes things get out of hands, and trouble starts up. I still remember we use to go and play football on the street. Across the street from our house, there was a big field. They haven’t built houses their yet, so we use to go play tag in the tall grasses that was taller than our head. In the spring, it would bloom yellow flowers, and our family would go take pictures in the field of yellow flowers. Oh, and the holidays, like July 4th, we would climb the roof and watch the fireworks from downtown. It was a ghetto, but happy life.

While living in the ghetto, I learned a lot of things that helps me today. The first thing that I learned was that nothing is free. That everything you get, you must give something in return. When I was about seven, I wanted a toy robot, it cost $10. 99. My dad said, “ I’ll buy it for you, if you work for it.” I said, “ Okay dad, I’ll do anything for that toy!”

When I said that, he smiled and bought the toy for me. Later that week, I was working so hard that my arms dropped dead. I didn’t even thought about playing with the toy robot anymore. Then the second lesson I learned was that things you want might not be what you really desire, after you buy it. After I finished working off my so called “ depth”, I started to play with the toy robot. I got really bored with the toy robot fast, and I gave it to my little brother. One of the most important lessons that I learned from my mom is that, if you want to be lazy, you could be lazy in an instance, but if you want to work hard, it takes time, and patients. My mother told me this when I didn’t stop whining about my chores, and right after she said that, I shut my yap hole and finished my chores. When I think about what my mother said, I just have an adrenalin rush and start working.

I’m glad though that I’ve lived in the ghetto. Living in the ghetto taught me many things in life. It showed me the good and bad side of living in the ghetto, how to survive in the ghetto, and all the things that I’ve done and seen, steams my ambition to learn and pursue the life of education to help my family not to go live in the ghetto anymore. This shows me how much I will struggle if I don’t get an education, and drop out of school. It shows me that even if you live in the ghetto, you can also find a path for you to follow, and find your place of happiness. This is what I learned out of living in the ghetto’s.