Parramore Kidz Zone

Orlando, FL

Sasha's Second Chance

As written by Lisa Early, Project Director

Fourteen-year-old Sasha lives in Parramore, a small community located in the heart of Downtown Orlando.  The doors and windows of her house are opened day and night, and strange adults wander in and out, drinking, playing loud music, and using and dealing drugs. 

Sasha is constantly bombarded at school and on TV by promises of the American Dream and pressure to achieve, in stark contrast to her everyday reality of weapons, drugs and criminal activity.  She is overwhelmed by the hypocrisy and constant need to convince herself that she can rise above her circumstances.  Sasha often thinks of killing herself but feels responsible for her 10-year-old brother Stephon, who clings to her.  She is the only healthy adult in his life, even though she’s neither healthy nor an adult.

2007 is the year that changes everything.  Church ladies “adopt” Sasha and send her to camp for a week in the remote mountains of North Carolina.  It’s the first time she has ever left home and for the moment, Sasha is hopeful.  She has now seen a world without weapons or fear or crime or disappointing adults, and learns she has a choice.

When Sasha returns home, the chaos of Parramore resumes.  Her 15-year-old brother Ira has been shot and is in the hospital clinging to life.  The cover story of the Orlando Sentinel features a huge picture of him, with his father in the background and this headline splashed across the front page:  Dad fears Afghanistan is safer than Parramore.

The family has again hit rock bottom.

Sasha doesn’t understand how politics works, but the City’s political leadership has also hit rock bottom.  The Mayor has had enough of Parramore’s despair. He raised a million dollars in charitable donations to launch Parramore Kidz Zone, or PKZ, like Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City.  And in the misery of Ira’s painful hospital stay, Sasha’s despair, and Stephon’s fear and clinging, a team of PKZ outreach workers finds Sasha and Stephon on the streets of Parramore and convinces their mother Cici to enroll them in PKZ.

Stephon joins the PKZ Chargers Football team and Sasha attends PKZ’s Digital U program at a local university.  She quickly stands out for her gift of storytelling, producing a video that juxtaposes her experience in the mountains of North Carolina with her brother’s near death at the hands of an armed thug.  In her closing remarks, Sasha declares her liberation:  “I was saved at camp, my brother was saved from a gun. Being saved is like getting a second chance. But that chance is only as important as what you do with it.”

PKZ’s leaders aim to level the playing field for Parramore’s children, and the discovery of this fourteen-year-old girl with so much potential becomes a personal crusade for them.  Sasha, Ira and Stephon become three of over 1,500 children that PKZ enrolls in two short years.  For the American Dream to be achieved, we must walk the talk of equal opportunity.  PKZ has drawn a line in the sand in the heart of Downtown Orlando.

Fast forward the camera one year to the summer of 2008, when Stephon celebrates his birthday for the first time.  With a big smile on his face, he holds up a cake with a big candle, shaped like the number 11, on top.  Football teammates and volunteer PKZ coaches surround Stephon and for the first time in his life, someone takes his photo.

Ira lands his first job, as an outreach worker for PKZ.  He spends the long hot summer days talking to kids on the streets about PKZ events and programs, signing them up.  He is no longer afraid to walk in places where the Pammo Snakes used to get beat up and sometimes killed.  He’s not in a gang anymore.  In the final days of summer, he flies on an airplane for the first time, to New York City, with 19 other Parramore youth and adult chaperones from PKZ.  He sees the world from the top of the Empire State Building, marches in a peace rally in Harlem, attends a Broadway play about the life of Thurgood Marshall, marvels at the ivied walls of the first college campus he has ever tread upon, Columbia University, and lays his sights for the very first time upon the Statue of Liberty.  He is forever changed.

Cici is also ready for change.  PKZ helps her get a real job and sticks with her when times get rough so she doesn’t give up.

This is also the summer that Sasha gets her first job.  As an office worker for PKZ, Sasha helps design and build a teen room at the City’s Downtown Recreation Center in Parramore.  She answers phones, enters data, and tutors neighborhood children.  She works on a documentary at PKZ Digital U called “The American Dream Project” with a group of neighborhood kids.

Sasha has more stories to tell.