Brief Lesson For Dumb Motherfuckers

How dare someone have the audacity to say that kids like me have no ambition and potential.
That we have no respect for education, all we do is kill each other and feed into drugs and gang violence statistics. This is for all those who believe I won’t make it with my background.

I come from one of the poorest countries, all of our kids don’t get into school. Our girls are sold and raped for walking around at 7 in the evening. Police officers will stop you on the side of the road and harass you for money, you just don’t want to get beat. I moved to the hills with my mother and her hippie friends at 2, that’s where my love for mother nature grew with me. Lots of parties, joints passed around while they played with me and did my hair. Getting into bed with a salt shaker next to me incase a leech decided to try its luck.

A year later, I moved back with my grandmother, all while my mother went to Thailand and the Maldives to persuade my father to come back and raise his daughter. We ate mangos while sitting in the sun, I kept telling my gramma how much I wanted to be white like her. All she ever said was that I was like chocolate, beautifully sun kissed.

Suddenly, I had a father. We also had money. We moved to another island. Life was finally turning out, but my parents were never home. That’s when war broke out. No matter how many hours after the tear gas, when you opened the windows, you could feel the sting. My school bus got stopped by men with loaded machine guns. The amount of houses I’ve seen go up in flames, there was something beautiful about the fire but I remembered it was someone’s home.
They used to feel safe there.

Moving to North America, I realized how much of a blessing it was that English was my third language. I can speak it fluently without an accent. This was the best part of my life, we were broke. I was rich in so many other ways, the amount of people who cared for me. My girls and I spent days in and days out sitting in the mall fishing quarters out of the fountain to buy mcdonalds and head to the library for some help on math. So what we didn't buy starbucks? We were focused on getting into university. But there was always someone getting locked up or shot up. How could we stay so positive in situations like that? Just make sure we don’t get sucked up in it, we just kept running each time we got caught.

Here’s to us. Fuck you if you say we had no struggles, that we didn't care about our education. This is also for all the strong females who dealt with pimps forever trying to offer us shit. WE ARE GOING TO FUCKING MAKE IT. Don’t ever forget that.