Transcript

Loving Where You're From | Emilio Joubert | TEDxGeorgetown

before I start I just like to throw a couple of quick shout outs the first one to my amazing sibling who's sitting in the front row and the second one to the students in the ask program I want to let you all know that you are seen that being said I love where I'm from seriously anybody who knows me knows that it's the only thing I ever talked about the sweet sounds of bachata merengue wrapping around you as you listen to the dialectical mix of English and Spanish and you look to your right and there's two old men with brown skin who have been playing Domino's for it's probably been three or four hours at this point I love the city of Lawrence Massachusetts but I also love everywhere I've ever lived in my life and that is a lot of places by the way I was originally born in and I grew up in for the first part of my life and a city called Haverhill Massachusetts on Emerson Street the hood growing up in that yellow house I can't remember it too well but I'm pretty sure that it was a crack house I remember every so often there would be knocks on the police knocks on the door next door and from the police and the next thing I know the person would move out not too long after that now luckily we didn't stay in that place for too long and we ended up moving in with my grandparents my mom and my dad never really had very much money and so we needed the opportunity to save up a bit of a nest egg and luckily my grandparents had a little bit of stability they both had good jobs so what ended up happening from there is we saved up money and I got to know my grandparents better and I ended up starting school at a school called Hillview Montessori charter public school but we didn't stay in Haverhill too long because then we moved into Bradford now Bradford was a great time there was a public pool a lot of my friends from middle school lived there and I knew a lot of people that live there besides that fact and so during that time that I spent in Bradford I must have spent about a thousand hours swimming in that public pool I must have got a million splinters from walking outside barefoot when my mom told me not to but I did it anyway and I also went on approximately one Joyride with my older cousin Omar where I told my parents that I felt bad the in reality I didn't because it was really fun but this time that I spent in Bradford a little bit of a facade and the reason why I say that is because when I wasn't swimming when I wasn't getting those splinters on my feet and when I wasn't going on joy rides when it was night and my parents thought that my sister and I were asleep when the lights are off and I put my door my ear to the door I would hear my parents saying something and they kept saying the word cancer and I didn't fully understand what the word cancer meant but I just know that not too long after that my mom walked up to me it might have been a week after something along those lines and she said Emilio I'm currently suffering from stage 4 breast cancer and I didn't know what that meant I must have been about seven or eight at this point she handed me a pamphlet in a book and said that she was gonna start losing hair and losing weight and I didn't fully understand what that meant but I just knew that I was there for the ride and at the same time my mom was diagnosed with cancer my dad had actually so he originally owned a business he owned a place called diamond Auto Detailing and at the same time that she was diagnosed with cancer he actually lost Diamond Auto Detailing and so ended up happening was we had this stability we had this nice place that we were living but we lost it all so we ended up moving back in with my grandparents and for a time this was actually pretty nice like I said my grandparents had a stability they both had jobs and so we were able to be secure but when my mom started to get really sick my dad's mental health also started to slip and he got worse and worse and he was arguing with my grandparents more and more and so whenever there was an argument I think both my sister and I knew that we had to go upstairs and we wouldn't deal with it and the arguments never lasted very long it would maybe be five minutes maybe ten but we always knew that the argument would subside after a brief moment but there was one night one cold night in December that I remember that the argument wanted for five minutes and then it went on for ten minutes and then 15 and 20 and I've never been sure about this decision that I made but I decided to go downstairs I still blame myself for this a little bit because when I went downstairs the first thing my dad said to me was relieving because he had gotten kicked out and my dad being the type of man that he was or is rather when he gets kicked out we all got kicked out so we packed our bags and it was cold like I said it was December in Massachusetts and I can't remember exactly what happened that night we either slept in the truck which we so affectionately called Bruno or snowflake or we ended up moving into a place called the 90 the knotty pine motel in Salisbury Massachusetts now Salisbury Massachusetts for anybody who's been to Massachusetts is actually a really beautiful place if you know you have property there or you just travel there you can go on vacation there it's great it's a beach there's a boardwalk you can have a lot of fun I did it a lot growing up but when you're in between homelessness having a home and looking at the beach and all these people having fun and having to drive really far to go to school every day not being sure where your next meal is coming from it can be very difficult so I remember that there was a time on Nickelodeon where the only episode of Avatar The Last Airbender they showed because it was a new show was episode 3 the southern air temple where Aang goes home for the first time and realizes that after a hundred years everybody that he knew who lived back then has passed away or left him behind and that he also lost his home because it's been destroyed and I don't know why but I remember me and my sister would sit there every single time and watch that episode again and again no matter how many times it aired I can't think of a more apt metaphor for what's going on in our lives during that time now luckily my dad had to connect in the city that I mentioned at the start of this speech Lawrence Massachusetts and we were able to find a condominium that looked really nice on the outside but was kind of falling apart on the inside there was in a really bad part of town right behind a nightclub and I really loved this place it was a lot of fun it was had like three floors and so we had the opportunity my sister and I to grow a little bit it felt like we had a bit of stability but at the same time there was a lot of complex things that were going on in the back because my mom had beaten cancer for the first time but then she relapsed and so while all of this was going on sometimes I went to bed behind that nightclub hearing arguments not being sure whether or not I was hearing fireworks during the 4th of July or gunshots and I found myself wondering what was next for me and so what ended up happening was I realized that the key to getting out the key to changing my life was education and so I started working harder in middle school I spent time on my studies and I made sure that I got to know myself better and that I tried harder and so what ended up happening was in eighth grade when it was finally time to apply I had found a series of schools that I really cared about and the top one that I truly cared about is a it's called Governors Academy and Byfield Massachusetts I was in love with this school so I sent in my application and was really happy when I discovered that I had gotten an interview I'm pretty sure everybody got an interview but for me it felt like a big deal and I remember I went to the interview with my mom and my grandma yeah both of the strongest woman that I know by the way and when we got there they were holding hands the whole time and as we stopped and we looked at the wonderful scenery and we took in a breath of fresh air and felt like we could smell the years of generational wealth accumulating we realized that this was the place where my life would change but they kept holding hands and they made good friends with the person at the front desk because they're both both they're both the most charismatic people that I knew as well and so while they were hitting it off with the front desk lady I was in the back focusing and trying to prepare for the interview that was coming up and so when I was finally called to the back for the interview I kept thinking about the fact that they were holding hands and they never let go and during the interview I realized that it was because they were praying for me because they were praying that this was going to be the chance that I had this was going to be the chance that I had to make my story and change my life that I was going to be able to change everything that I wasn't going to have to deal with the homelessness with the poverty with the fact that my mom was getting more sick and my dad's mental health was declining that this is where everything changes and so for a brief moment I turned into a diamond and that was the best interview I've ever given in my life I wish that I could do the same thing now that I'm older but alas 13 was where I peaked and so we left feeling confident taking one look Brett look taking one look back and we waited and so after three or four weeks we got a letter in the mail and I had already run upstairs as I always did way in front of my mom and my mom had beaten cancer again but now had relapsed for the third time and so her body was falling apart and she wasn't able to do things as well as she used to she could still drive but she was really slow to go up the stairs and so one day she drove me back home and we saw that there was a letter from Governors Academy in the mail she said Amelia we have a letter and so I sprinted back downstairs took the letter and ran upstairs and totally left her behind and I was about to open it and then I realized that she was gonna take awhile so I walked back downstairs leaving the letter on the table and I grabbed her by the hip as I always did and slowly brought her back up the stairs until we made it to the top and I guided her to the table and we opened it and we were both so excited because we knew like I had said that this was the chance that I had to change my life and so we open it and we read it over and it looks amazing there's a bunch of really great words that are really encouraging in it but there's one word that we don't fully understand wait-listed I never got into governor's Academy now had gotten into some other Catholic schools that were pretty good I'm not gonna call any of any schools out but there was one school in the Lawrence area they cost about twelve thousand dollars a year that offered me financial aid six thousand dollars and when I spoke to the president and filled out an application to get more financial aid they gave me a thousand dollars which they gave me an extra one thousand so I had seven thousand to be honest felt more like a rejection in the wait-listed but the most important moments in life aren't always dramatic and the most important moment of my life was just that completely normal one day my dad walked to a local bodega and saw that one of the symbols on Ash on a workers shirt had said NDC R and he said sir he said what does that mean to which she had responded to him and said notre-dame Cristo Rey and this was a very important four letter acronym for me because he came back after he learned about this school and he realized that notre-dame Cristo Rey high school is a high school that's very affordable to students such as myself and now the reason for that is both incredibly complex and incredibly simple it's incredibly simple because there's a four-letter acronym that explains why it's able to be so affordable the corporate work-study program CW SP but it's incredibly complex because that four-letter acronym is also the most incredible solution to anything I've ever seen in my life so what ends up happening is students who attend Notre Dame Cristo Rey are able to work one to two days a week in order to help pay off their tuition this meant that I was able to go to a school with competitive academics in the area for about $1,000 a year which was very affordable for my family on top of the scholarship that I had received which meant that I was barely paying anything and the 1 the 2 the 1 to 2 days a week that I worked were also incredibly important for me as I grew up because that meant that by the time that I had graduated during my senior year I had worked for internships at great companies the first was nuance communications which is a tech firm the second one is our q link which is a cancer research company the third one is Emerson ecologic which was a health company and then the fourth one you guys all know this is Keurig Green Mountain where I got to drink a lot of coffee and I got to be really careful because they had a huge coffee wall which was great but before I could even start any of that work that I had there I had to attend a two-week training seminar and during this two-week training seminar I had the chance to learn how handshakes worked which I was really bad at at first I learned how to talk to a roomful of people that's way smarter than me such as this one and I also learned a little bit about being timely now the president of my high school had a same sister Mary Alice saying if you're on time you're late and if you're early you're on time and this really stuck stuck to me because I remember the first time that I was late for anything at Notre Dame Cristo Rey it was the last day of the summer training program and my mom had a really bad night now when my mom had a bad night I had a hard time sleeping because I always tried to make sure that she was okay so I showed up to school 40 minutes late as I had woken up and I always walked to school because my dad was out doing whatever and by the time I had made it sister Mary Alice was the only person left at the school and so she drove me in complete silence for 40 minutes and by the time I had gotten about 30 minutes into the ride I had cracked I realized that this was her tactic for making me talk so I simply said to her as I just said to you all my mom had a bad night her lung collapsed and we're not sure if she's going to survive now I don't remember what she said to this but we just had a conversation seven years later and she said that this conversation has stuck to her more than almost any other conversation she's ever had during the time at school and I never would have thought that seven years in the future I could have an impact there was even close to the impact that she had on me because sister Mary Alice ended up becoming one of my closest mentors and she taught me about the importance of mentorship during my time in high school and it was because of her and because of the corporate work-study program that I was able to succeed excuse me succeed and thrive during my time in high school I had so many mentors Deb wall Tony Messina Tanya George's people who came to my house and believed in me and taught me to go beyond when it felt like I didn't have anything left these people inspired me but they also taught me to become a mentor for other people because while my mom was passing away and while my dad's mental health was slipping and when I felt like I had nothing left these people were the ones that I turned to and they were the ones who let me become the person that you all see before you today these people like I had mentioned Tony Messina Deb wall sister Mary Alice they're the reason why I'm able to speak to you all and give a TED talk and they're the reason why I've been thriving so my message to all of you for this talk that I have which has been such an honor is to always try your hardest to become somebody's mentor because as I said seven years later since I since you know I started attending Notre Dame Cristo Rey and not too long almost three and a half years after I graduated a lot has happened my mom passed away surrounded by the people that she loves breathing her last breath in a wonderful hospice room I ran away from my father and ended up living with my grandparents of course I got into Georgetown and I'm a senior but I also have worked two internships during my time at Georgetown the first with the Department of Education in the second with Instagram where I'll be working full time next year and one of the things that I really want to impart is that the most important piece of growing up for me was education and I feel like a younger version of myself would attribute the success that I've had today with my own skill with the things that I put together with how hard I worked but I realized now that if it wasn't for those people who came together and believed in me when it felt like I had nothing left that I wouldn't be half the man that I am and so it is because of mentorship that I'm able to be here and to succeed beyond all measures and so I want everybody to know that if you all become a mentor for somebody else you can change somebody's life just as my life was changed by those who believed in me thank you very much [Applause]