Audio File
Transcript
Hello, my name is Marciano Brown. I was born in Pittsburgh, and I lived on the Hill for about 10 years. Oh, my birthday. It’s July 31st, 2003. My childhood was- it was… It was alright, it was alright, but it was like… you got tissues? So when I was a kid, it was just me and my other two sisters. We were growing up on the North side. We had one bed to share, so just three of us in the bed, and then after I moved because we got evicted, I had to move to the Hill with my grandfather. Then my mother had two other babies. So now she has five kids. It’s kind of hard. My family is large, like, I’m a child of nine. The parts of Pittsburgh where I grew up, they were kind of worse. So if you asked me when I was a kid growing up, I’d have been like “Oh, the Hill’s better than what I’m used to.” What changes would like to see in the Hill… I wouldn’t want to say it’s impossible, but there’s a lot of run down, beaten up houses and abandoned houses around. The windows are all boarded up. Like, that’s most of the houses on the Hill. But when you walk outside, you also see all this construction for all this new housing. They’re doing all that; they could have made like five of the old houses like new. That’s the change I want to see on the Hill, at least. Like they’re building all this stuff but not fixing the stuff that’s already made. So when that runs down, what are they going to do? If you know the history of the Hill, we used to be like Wall Street. When you’re walking down Centre or you’re walking down towards Wyalt, those used to be stores, and people used to come to those just to buy stuff. It was like the mall but outside. There was always something, like parties and stuff, live music just on the street. It was like lively. So, right now, I’m an administrative assistant at the Grayson Center. Everything that stayed the same from my childhood is gone, except the Grayson Center. Like, most of my memories are here. The Grayson Center, because it’s like the big part of the Hill District now. Like, we just ended up growing up here. We started off at the camp as campers, and now I’m working here, stuff like that. And I can see the kids from here grow up too, and get jobs here or get help with jobs. And we work here. We help you with your resume and stuff so you can enter the workforce, stuff like that. That’s a neat experience. A really interesting one from here is when we go on trips, trips like Puerto Rico, Ireland, they went on a cruise, they went to a ski trip like the boys, they had a ski trip, places like that. They do that so… like, usually kids from the Hill, they don’t see stuff like that. If I didn’t go to this program, I would never- I could never afford that. But they help kids like me and kids like you go there, who would never see those places. The best aspect of the Hill is the Grayson Center. Right now, we’re just expanding right now, also into other places like Allegheny and Arlington, like we’re trying to get a program out there started right now. We’re just going to expand and get bigger. The girls becoming women like you guys or just like the girls in the after-school program. I try to give them sound advice I wish I knew. Like when you want to go to college, I’m like “But do you want to go to college?” There’s, like, so many options for, like, a second education. You can go to trade school. You could do nails. You could be a technician, I always encourage, like, just ways to better yourself. How can we, like, break down barriers that hold women back, just like a lot of stuff in the government happening right now? So the best thing I could say is vote. Like, I’m talking to my friends right now and back then, they’re like, “Oh, that has nothing to do with me.” But these new policies have something to do with everybody, especially if you’re, like, an immigrant, a woman, so, like, the best thing you can do is vote.