Ready to Live: Roy

Every night we hear gunshots. I don't know where they're coming from, but I'm used to it now. Usually, I'm asleep and I know it's nothing, 'cause it's all the way over there on the other side of the street. Lots of neighborhoods are dangerous. Mine is pretty in between. You see lots of fights. Anything can be happening on my street.

There are about two or three fights each week in my school, and about every day you see somebody up there in the office getting in trouble. One day I was walking home with my cousin and there was this big boy in a higher grade who used to pick on me every day. One day he pushed me and hit my head on a tree and I got real mad and I whipped his behind and he went home crying.

I'd like to start my own business, a sort of institute for people that are on the streets. I would try to bring these people to my institute during visiting hours so they could do what they please as long as they don't try to hurt anybody. It would be sort of like prison and hospital put together, but you don't get beat and you don't have people watching over you every two minutes. I would try to make it better for them and for other people. They would have somewhere they could unwind to, somebody who knows what they're going through. And they could just talk to each other.

I think it's important to have somebody to talk to because there's a lot of different people in the world and some people that look different might have the same kind of problem. Like if somebody come from all the way over there in New York City, if they come down here to Atlanta to live, somebody in Atlanta will probably have the same problem that they have and they could probably help each other solve it.

I try to stay out of violence. Like if there's a fight at school, sometimes I look at it, and then when the bell rings I just go home and try to forget about it.

If I had a lot of money, I'd get a clean-up pool that comes around at least two or three times a week to clean Up the street and I would pay them for doing all the hard work. Most people does not like seeing all this garbage around the street, but they don't do anything about it.

If I had three wishes, my first wish is that there would be no drugs no more and that no one would throw paper on the ground. My second wish would be that my mom wouldn't have so much trouble getting stuff done for us and would have enough time to do her work and things that she really enjoys. For my third wish I wish I had all the best Nintendo tapes and someplace where I could be by myself. You need time with yourself, you know, 'cause you have to deal with your own self without bringing other people into it.

Roy, age 10, Atlanta