By: Joshua Coello
Joshua is an Energy Convertors fellow. The fellowship focused on improving public education by lifting the voices and ideas of those most impacted the students. Each student chooses a larger issue to research and build solutions for. To follow each fellows development, please go to medium.com/energy-convertors.
Do you ever imagine what kids from Oakland go through on a daily? Do you wonder if your house bills are paid? Well, now imagine you’re a high school freshmen that lives with a single parent in a crowded house full of people with no electricity because of a lack of money.
While living in this house, you’re still expected to wake up on time, get yourself ready for school, and determine if anyone is available to give you a ride to school or if you are going to walk. Then, after a full day of school, having to come home alone everyday and pretend that you’re happy and that you had a great time at school. However, you are still overwhelmed about how the family is going to get more than $1,000 to pay the electricity company for past due bills and to restart the electricity.
There are no lights.
You wonder why you have to pay if you have a parent just laying around the house acting as if life is perfect. At first, you believed you wanted to write this because it’s personal but now you know it is much more than that. It’s something that other people don’t see. They don’t.
They don’t see how hard living is for some kids in Oakland. Only if people knew what you went through they’d understand how hard it is to follow your dreams that others around you abandon so quickly.
But you still want to do something with your life. You want to get a job. You want to be a somebody — not just another regular Oakland kid. School is something you want to finish but your life is so distracting. Life takes your focus away from what you should be able to do with no effort.
As a kid, you should be able to come to school and it be smooth. But you struggle. You struggle with all the classes but you just gotta keep going. You hope things get better. You are leading yourself to a brighter path but you need to learn how to turn on the lights. You need the light to lead the way.
Where are the lights?