Billy

Billy is now a sophomore at Seattle Central Community College and plans to transfer to a 4 year university. SEA provides Billy with gap scholarship support and tutoring. Billy is an active member of the SEA community and often participates in outreach and community events.

I was born in Los Angeles in 1983. My father was 23, and my mother was 25 when I was born. My father, and mother split up after the birth of my baby sister, Jessy, in 1988. After that we moved back and forth from Utah to California. I never spent more then a year in one school. My father didn't come around much to visit us. My mother raised the two of us on her own with help from welfare, the Mormon church she belonged to, and family. She married my step-dad when I was six years old. He had a real bad coke habit, and put my mother into such bad debt that we were kick out onto the streets. I was nine years old, and my sister was four years old.  

My mother then put us into the care of my Aunt Karyn, her fraternal twin, for three years, while she tried to mend things and divorce our step-dad. The physical abuse didn't start till I was twelve years old. Now that I am older I can understand why she punished me in those horrible ways. It stemmed from her father's abuse of her when she was a child, so hitting was the only way she was taught to teach right from wrong to her children. She would throw me to the ground, hit me in the stomach, bite, scratch, break pictures over my head, and so on. When I was fourteen years old I started running away from home. I would give my mother the phone numbers of the houses I would go stay at. What kid ever does that?! She put me in juvenile hall 10 times in one year. I just couldn't take the abuse at home anymore. Eventually, after I begged and begged, she gave custody over to my father. I was sixteen.

My father and I moved up here to Seattle into a one bedroom apartment in Tukwila, and I attended Foster High School as a sophomore, and a junior. At the time, my father was doing short haul trucking. He was drinking and smoking coke quite heavily. I was a junior in high school at the time living in the dining room on the couch. He would come home at like three in the morning waking me up. That was real hard on me trying to get good grades, and his verbal abuse was crushing my self esteem. So, I left home and dropped out of school to live on the streets of Seattle. I found refuge in the University District. They have tons of meals daily, shelters, and drop-in centers for youth. I got my GED at the University District Youth Center while living in a bush a block away.

I had always dreamed about going to college, but I could never get my parents to take my need for an education seriously. So, I signed up for SEA. They gave me the help I needed. They paid for my tuition and books, and help with my bills until I could apply for financial aid at 24 years old. They still help me now with tutoring and miscellaneous stuff that I can't afford.

Without SEA I could have never gotten a break from the endless cycle of drug abuse and aimless traveling that the streets were offering me. Though, traveling can be fun, it isn't when you have nowhere to go home to when the temperature drops, and the rain is always soaking through your clothes to your skin. SEA rocks. When the community contributes to SEA it helps many more people get an education and hope for a better future.

~ Billy