CSDR - Home Away From Home

CSDR - Home Away from Home

Just sitting here thinking about my past, thinking about how much time has flown by. Here I am sitting here at UCI in the Education Resource Center, eating my lunch and reminiscence about the old days. Thinking back to when I was a teen and being in a school at Riverside, California where my roots were planted and where my personality grew to become who I am today. I look at this picture and recalled - Chet, Enrique, and Brian who stood next to me and we graduated Middle School at CSDR. Behind us was our dorm, Rubidoux, and this was where I stayed -- my home away from home.

The reason it was home away from home was because Riverside was far away from Barstow, California. I stayed at this dorm Sunday Nights to Friday afternoon -- where we took buses or vans to transport us from our homes and to school where we stayed in our dormitories. This was life for me from 1989-1995. These friends I made, there people I learned from and had great enlightened conversations with. Now, I think back to where they are right now? What are they doing? As I sit here at UCI and thinking back to what I wanted to be when I "grew up." Of course, I wanted to be a writer or an actor. Things can change through the years and who I am today is due to our childhoods and what we went through as adolescents. The maturity level that we went through as a student at CSDR was due to the major independence in living in a Dorm and learning to live with others in the same room. The only negative impact of living at CSDR was missing one's family, being away from home. A lot of growing up with Mom and Dad, and siblings was greatly missed. Was my time away at CSDR worth it? In many ways I would say yes due to me learning about the Deaf-World, and learning about the language of ASL.

The connections of missing home and family due to being at the dorms at CSDR and attending school was a way to think back to the then and respect and embrace the now of my life. I am obtaining goals and learning so much at UCI, and I believed I have grown since my days at CSDR. CSDR gave me my identity as a Deaf person, who is able to achieve whatever I put my mind to. CSDR has been my home for a lot of years and I made a lot of friends. I even respected the establishment that teachers and counselors who were at the school because they were part of my experiences in growing up. To be matured at this age and think back to the past and thank CSDR for being my Home for awhile. Now living here at Irvine, California, I think that the belief that Deaf people can do anything they want -- except hear is proven true. I can't hear as much as the average person, but I do listen to the past and hear that I was once young and went to CSDR, but now I am ambitiously trying to be a teacher to be able to give back to others who have the opportunities as I do in the future at this wonderful school. I do hope they take advantage of their "home away from home."