Narrative Essay On Family Diversity

On the 29th of August in 1992 at Richland Memorial Hospital in Columbia, South Carolina around 5:51 A.M, there was a beautiful baby girl born in the back seat of her aunt’s car right outside the hospital named Sharmell Kaleliah Valencia Davis. I was so pale that everyone mistaken me for another race. I was named after my mother, grandmother, my father and my mother, sister, Sharmell is after Charlene, my mother, sister, Kaleliah being after my grandmother, Lela, Valencia is after my mother, Valerie and Davis after my father. I believe my family had a tradition with names because my sister and I had the Sh or Ch sounds and it was spelled in that form. I was the only daughter was not expected to be born and I was born with a knot in the back of the head, where the doctors took blood from. I was told it was a birth affect but I stop worrying about it and live with it. After the birth process, I stayed in the hospital for a week, around the time of me going home, I was kidnapped from the hospital. I looked like a white baby so anyone could have mistaken me for another race or it could have been because I was so cute. Luckily, my grandmother kept a close eye on me, while the nurse put me in my little crib that I slept in. My grandmother saw the woman and chased after her in an old school Cadillac. After the chase, my mother had the option of pressing charges because she did not because she understood that accidents could happen. When I was told this story, I thought about the TV show, switched at birth. I was returned to my mother and I got to see my home in Camden, S.C. I grew up in the country near a farm around a lot of non-English speaking individuals. In the country, there were a lot of cute guys, nosy people, jealous females, and drug dealers. My life began in the backwoods of the country; I grew up in a church because my great grandfather and uncle was a preacher, so it was only right to stay in the House of the Lord. I went to two Baptist Churches; both churches were filled with family members. Deciding which church was right for me was difficult; now that I am older I do not attend church much because of the drama that is not of God. When I was in college, I got to travel and experience different churches beliefs. I attended a white Christian Church; their worship was different from what I was used to, they played rock gospel with a little R&B. It was unique to me. I never experience so much love after attending different churches, but they made me feel at home. Although, there was drama in the churches I attended, it never took away from giving God the highest praise. There are some cultural differences in the world, I remember in elementary, my class learned a traditional Mexican dance that we had to present in front of the whole school. At the time, I thought it was …show more content…
I was a peer educator and students related to me because I was just like them and we understood one another rather than speaking to an adult who do not know the trends and what is going on around in today’s generation. My opinion is that people in the same generation understand each other more than a different generation because older adults had a different view on life where some had to deal with seeing the signs of racism to where children today are just getting partial of what parents have been through. For example, blacks and whites had their own bathrooms and blacks had to get their food from the back rather than walk in. In society, people do not know how to look pass color or skin tones. In small towns or cities, people do not have support systems to turn to for help in mental illness or racism because their cities support money rather than serious issues. Mental illness needs to be supported everywhere, especially for the youth, more youths will face mental illness because they are transitioning from one place to another or one school to another and they need