Personal Narrative: Lower Ninth Ward

My home town, where I grew up at, and where I am at now. These three characters link to the three different houses.

On 1/16/17 at 0225 hours my partner, Officer Thebeau #8402, and I were working patrol assigned to unit 3A11. We responded to a radio call of “shots fired” in the area of 814 N. Garfield Ave. The comments of the call stated, a 19 year old female was shot in the hand.

I didn't always live in California. Before California I lived in Denver, Colorado. Before Denver I lived in Aurora, Colorado. When we moved to california we had a family of five. We moved to California, when I was six, Then we lived at my grandma’s house in Riverside for a year. We found a place on Ferree Street and that became our home.

The city of Chicago has been displayed as a dangerous city in which all residents are affiliated with drugs, gangs, and misconduct of firearms. Whether someone fits into this stereotype or not, is normally based on their surroundings and their interactions with others. Growing up in Gage Park, named one of the worst neighborhoods, falling into this stereotype and becoming affiliated with drugs, guns, and gangs, would not be too hard for someone to do. However, I have lived in Gage Park my whole life and have not fallen into the status quo. I have had family members and friends fall into this realm of unpleasantness and watching them become another wrong kind of statistic is upsetting. I have been faced with the decision of continuing to have

Hot and humid weather, hurricanes, Mississippi river, jazz, delicious food, famous vacation place, and relatively high proportion of black people. These are all that I’d heard about New Orleans before I came to this city. A month has passed since I arrived to New Orleans, and I experienced more than I’d knew. But still, although I was aware of the fact that what I had experienced until now are not everything about New Orleans, I was surprised when I learned about the new aspects of New Orleans through the service work, class, and the lecture of guest speaker.

hen I was 5 years old I moved from a small house in the West Side of Chicago and moved to a 19-storey building near the North Side of Chicago. When you look at most of the people living there, you don’t feel intimidated or uncomfortable because there are all kinds of people living there of many races and ages. There are good and bad times, but my personality has been affected by both.

As we looked we realized that what we had witnessed before was only the beginning. There were houses with broken windows, caved in roofs and plant life invading into the house space. These houses were deteriorating in front of our eyes. Some houses had broke open doors with the belongings inside thrown about like a tornado had gone through it. I gasped as my jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I knew people had worries about us going to Detroit, but the place we were located was luxurious compared to what I was seeing now. One of my youth leaders explained that this was one of the more troubled parts of Detroit, the reason we came here to help. When things started going bad everyone up and left their homes in order to escape, with all these homes be evacuated, criminals would break in to tear out the copper and steal other belongings. Some of the deteriorating abandoned houses had papers on them that labeled a date that they would get cleaned out and tear down, and all those dates had already been past while the houses stood there still. Multiple signs showed that this neighborhood in Detroit is being neglected, and clearly has been for a long

We didn’t always live on Mason Park Way. Before it was Biddeford Pl on the first floor and before that it was the eleventh floor in Belgium and before that I can’t remember. By the time we got to Biddeford Pl, it was the four of us. Me my mom my brother and my dad. Until we had moved to our house on Mason Park Way, I never fully understood what having a family and a home meant to me. The house on Mason Park Way is ours. We don’t have to worry about paying rent or keeping the immaculate white walls clean. It’s ours and we have the liberty to do whatever we want. And it’s big. The large rugs are cozy and our furniture is inviting. And it’s ours.

During the information session, the admissions counselor mentioned the service learning courses, and this was something that made Tulane stick out to me. I have toured a variety of other schools, but none of those schools had opportunities like Tulane to participate in community service. Recently, I went on Tulane’s website and found a list of service learning courses and saw multiple courses that interested me. One of the courses involved taking water samples from different areas of New Orleans to monitor the health of the local water ecology system and reporting the results to students and officials in the New Orleans area. The opportunities I would receive at Tulane to excel academically, socially, and spiritually are unparalleled compared to any other college or university. Tulane is an exceptional institution with a multitude of distinct qualities that make it the ideal university for me to attend in the

There is no better preparation for a college student planning on attending law school than

Famous musicians such as; Jay-Z, Bruce Springsteen, Tito Puente, and John Lennon have written songs about it. It’s the setting for hundreds of amazing movies including; The Avengers, The Men in Black, The Godfather, and the Wolf of Wall Street. New York City, my hometown, the greatest city on Earth. There are plenty of things to do in this city. You can watch a play on Broadway, take a walk through Central Park, or visit the Statue of Liberty, but you rarely hear about my favorite part of this city, and that’s the food. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a place with a larger selection or with more delicious food.

It was only two ordinary summers ago when I had attended a three week long camp in the city of Baltimore. The city was split. From one angle, you saw a verdant place with such diversity and history. Then there was the rundown, impoverished city with depressing, unfinished, and dead brick buildings every other way, fading graffiti from teenagers who were most likely now adults, and a homeless man or woman holding a sign with their cluttered belongings lining the sidewalks, a torn cardboard sign that had a reference to some verse in the Bible or the words “anything helps.” To those people, where I went would have been a heaven. The college campus had newly built buildings with fiery red bricks, tall marble columns, ecstatic college students wherever

I am interested in the Corporate and Litigation areas of law. I really enjoyed the practical aspect of Criminal and Civil Litigation during the Diploma. I am also interested in the Corporate are of Law. This is because I love a challenge and from a very young age I have always had an interest in Business. This interest stemmed from watching my father, a self-employed business man succeeding.

First I went to Westside freshman school. It was at Morton. I'm from the southward but wanted to go to high school with a different crowd of people so I went to Westside. Which is the westward. But I didn't like it there, I wanted to be around upperclassmen,and it was only freshmen there. So I transferred to Shabazz. That's the southward ,where I'm from. Got there and started being around the people I grew up with and got into a lot of shit so I got expelled. My sophomore year I went back to Westside, but I went to what we call the Big Westside, it's supposed to be sophomores and up, but that year they changed it and made two different Westside High school, so both had freshman in it. There I got into alot of shit because I'm crip,so they

This city is unlike any other. It bleeds privilege and a cold empathy one would detect in a doctor’s office. When the world topples sideways and destroyed itself, the richest of the country gathered together to rebuild something. They gifted themselves with paved streets and flashy clothes. Their fears of drinking unclean water, or not being able to eat became foreign. No longer did they allow themselves to suffer alongside the rest of us, nor did they attempt to help.