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Transcript
My name is Malaysia Rainey. My childhood here just growing up on a Hill was actually really, really great. It was real, family oriented, a lot of black businesses. People were genuinely happy, even if they didn’t have a lot, they still felt like you had a lot because everyone was actually looking out for each other and just me growing up playing, I see a lot of kids these days they don’t play. Everyone’s like on their phones. Like you couldn’t keep me in the house. I was everywhere outside at the park riding bikes. It was good. It was real good. I’ve seen a lot of changes, I would say just with maybe like businesses and stuff like that. I feel like we have a lot of stuff that is accessible to us now, like even just for the Grayson Center, for example, like you can come here and you can get, you know, help with your homework, you can get help with personal things. You can just come hang out if you need somewhere to go. If you just need a safe place to be, if you’re having a bad day, you can be here. I would just like the community aspect to be back. Everyone looking out for each other, everyone looking out for each other’s children. Any time anyone’s in need, just the love and the respect that everyone has for each other and our elders. These days, I don’t think that a lot of us, even people my age, they don’t respect the elderly as they should, and just do just do the things that they need to do, even without asking.
I would actually have to say my mom inspired me to be the person I am today. I always just growing up. I was like, I have to be this person. Whatever comes my way, I have to knock it down. You have to keep going. If you dwell on something that keeps you in the past or keeps you down, you’ll stay down. If you look forward and make sure you get your way, then you got to keep going and you’ll get there no matter what. Never let anyone tell you that you can’t do anything, or if you feel something’s not right, never do anything because someone else is doing it.
My mom is actually great. She’s one of the strongest people that I know, just me growing up. I’ve always had both of my parents, but I have a younger sibling who has a disability and my mom didn’t get much help with him. So just seeing her raise me raised my other brother and a child with a disability. Always seeing her had to make sacrifices, do a lot of things she didn’t want to do. But she still had to do them just, you know, to take care of her kids. So she’s she’s real strong. She’s more confident that she would ever know. My freshman year I went to Philadelphia to Cheyney University. It was a historically black college. I actually transferred my sophomore year to Slippery Rock University, which I did like Cheyney. I just didn’t like the the chaos of it but I do wish I would have stayed just for the atmosphere. Because it was so much better, it was so much smaller, too. So you were able to get to know everyone but Slippery Rock was good too, you know, I still got to know people, I started off as an early childhood major and actually switched to psychology. That’s what I graduated with. Being in Psych. I have a hard time, I guess I should say kind of sticking to one thing and mastering it first before I moved to another one. I switched majors three times, so I went from early childhood to social work to psychology and it was one of the things where I was like I can’t keep switching. You gotta stick to one thing and master it so you can be good at it, and then you can do it. Instead of like, being all over the place. So that was a big challenge for me. So I gotta get something and stick to it, master it and then move on to the next step. So you can keep going. It’s not like you have all these doors opened.
I feel like a lot of young women. These days should slow down, learn themselves, learn what they want to do, and just be that the social media, the materialistic stuff that will all be there. That’s not the ultimate goal at this point. Get educated, find something that you really like to do and do good at it and master it. For it, if you want to do something, do it, research it and do it like failing is a part of the process. So even if you do something and you don’t feel like you’re doing good at it, or it’s not going anywhere, you gotta just keep going and try it. It’s trial and error, all throughout life.