Tough Times

Growing up was not easy for me, it was the hardest part of my life. I grew up in Bacolod which is a big city like Calgary, where my father’s side lives. My family back in Bacolod were my closest family because of the bonds we shared together as a big family. The area that I lived in is where kids learned to smoke, inhale drugs and gamble with adults at a young age and I was one of them. Everyday going to school, I would see these things happen in front of me. The kindergarten school I went to was about a ten minutes walk from my home. When I was walking back home, one kid younger than me offered me to hit the cigarette he was smoking. I did it. After a while, my friends who were older than me began to teach my brother and I to smoke. We both started smoking because of the wrong friends we chose. Everyday for one month we would smoke about one pack of cigarettes a day, at ages 6 and 8.  Imagine how young we were when we started smoking. Its unbelievable thinking the past, but it taught me what’s right and wrong. It was also hard because my dad was not around to guide me the right way. Mom was always working at the hospital as a licensed nurse. When we moved to Canada as a family we started life all over again. My parents had to look for other jobs to keep us off the streets. As children, our job was to study our butts off and English as a second language has been a challenge for us. Everything had been going well since we moved to Canada. My past taught me how to be a better person and understand what is right and wrong.

-By Richard Chavez