Читать книгу The Seven Year-Old Pilot - Capt. Steven Archille - Страница 9

As the summer of 1981 approached, I had been in the States for a little over a year, and my parents moved our little family to the Borough of Staten Island on the other side of New York harbor. Soon afterwards my little sister Lisa was born. We lived in a building in the West Brighton housing projects, on the sixth floor. It was a two-bedroom apartment, and Betty, Lisa, and I shared a room, with Mom and Dad in the other bedroom just down the short hallway. In what turned out to be a stroke of luck for me, our apartment, which was high up, had a view facing the Goethals Bridge and Newark New Jersey, home of Newark International Airport. To my delight, I soon realized that on a clear day, I could see all the airplanes taking off and landing in the distance, and often parked myself in front of the window, stared at the airplanes, and dreamt.

The school that Betty and I attended, Public School 18 (P.S. 18) was luckily just a couple of blocks from our building, so we could walk there and back together every day. The West Brighton housing projects, or just “the projects” as Betty and I called it, was a group of eight buildings, each eight stories tall, with a mixture of two to four bedroom apartments. The New York City Housing Authority ran it, which meant the rents were much lower than in comparably sized, privately owned apartment complexes in the city. The low rents were the main reason my parents had moved us there, as it would allow them to start saving money to buy their own house. This was one of their dreams so that Betty, Lisa, and I could have a better life. In the meantime, we had to put up with all the issues that went along with living in the projects.

Betty and I soon discovered that we were being raised quite a bit differently from many of the neighborhood kids. Although they allowed us a bit of freedom, Mom and Dad always tried to foster the same ideals of discipline – respect for elders and manners – in their kids with which they had been raised with in Haiti. With Dad still driving a taxi and being gone most of the day, the task of keeping us in line fell mostly on Mom.

My parents stressed the importance of education and did not tolerate any negative reports from our teachers about our behavior in class, so we made sure to stay in line. I was an average student who brought home average report cards, and my parents often reminded me that doing well in school held the key to me realizing my dream of flying. I soon learned that Betty and I were among the few students with both of our parents at home raising us together. As I grew older, I realized just how fortunate we were.