Jon, 25 – One foster home was not enough

The first year of college Jon’s dream was to play Volleyball for the school team. He started off good, but something along the way made him stop.

“I thought I was going through this stage called ‘growing up’ but I wasn’t. I just got caught up with like the wrong group of people and made some bad decision that set me back from what my career path was.”

“ I learned that not everyone that you surround yourself with is your friend. Not even if you share house with this person, it doesn’t make them your friend… I wouldn’t really go back and change anything because then I wouldn’t have learned that lesson.”

“Oakland was rough. I was a foster kid at a really young age. I was maybe a foster kid since the age of 5 or 6. I moved to a good amount of foster homes maybe from a good 10 to 12 really, till I finally moved with my uncle at the age of 13.”

“Some of them [foster homes] were good, some of them were bad. The foster homes were very temporary and then when you thought you started you liked the place you’re moving on to the next spot. So after the third foster home, I learned not to get attached to the family.”

“There’s this one time a ran away one of the foster homes at the age of like 7. It was stupid. There was this older who was living there and he wouldn’t let me play his video games, so I got mad so I packed my backpack. I was wearing like this onesie. I packed my backpack  with like snacks, no clothes and like a game boy and I ran away and I caught the bus all the way to San Francisco.”

“ I always had like a small ‘wanna act on my own intuition’ kind of thing.”

Do you know your parents?

“I know my mom, I know really well. We have a pretty unorthodox relationship. The reason, why I say unorthodox, is because now I kind of have grown into like caretaker of her. I’m making sure she is doing the things she needs to do, for the most part, I don’t check in on her much either cause we don’t have that kind relationship like ‘oh call me after..’. Maybe I’ll talk to her every once in every two to three months.”

“I kind of just need to make sure that like I’m doing everything I can to support her, at least the minimum efforts and then I can move forward to the maximum… I like her I love her, she’s adorable.”

“As for my dad, I have never met my dad.”

“My mom told my dad that I wasn’t his.”

Did you have a mother figure when you grew up?

“Which was really funny is that some of my best friends that I’ve made in Santa Barbara, they all have been women. Even my support system now, the people that have written my letters of recommendations have all been women and when I think about it now, all my foster parents have all been women as well.”

How is it being black in America?

“It’s great. It’s great. It has it’s negative but it has its positives.”

“I often have to justify ‘how black am I’, those are the only thing that kind of hurts me a little bit. I constantly have to justify to people who look like me that I am black, but I just speak differently from you and then to people who don’t look me, I have to justify that I am black because I don’t act the certain way that they thought black people act. So those are frustrating part.”

However, it has its perks…

“Teachers automatically know my name cause I’m the only black student in class. I get asked if the fried chicken is done or not haha I guess it works.”

What makes you happy?

“A bottle of water. Bottle of water makes me happy cause sometimes, as cliche as this sounds, sometimes when I’m really thinking ‘ I have this bottle of water and there’s electricity running around me, there’s clean air, clean water like this, I should be happy for this. There are places where this is very hard to obtain.”

“Having the ability to make other people laugh and smile also makes me happy. When Warriors win. When I feel like I’ve really made an impact somewhere, that really makes me happy.