Teen Will Carry Dream Along With Torch

My life has exposed me to many of the sorrows of this world. . . .

That was how 17-year-old Ginger Childs began her college application essay.

I could either fall prey to this chaos and accept this way of life, or I could find a way out and determine my own fate. . . .

At 3:57 p.m. today, the Watts teenage mother will write another chapter. She will jog past Disney Studios in Burbank holding the Olympic flame, proudly pursuing her dream of going to college to become a lawyer, an ambition inspired by watching “The Cosby Show” as a child of the Jordan Downs housing project.

I have grown accustomed to young girls getting pregnant, to drop out of school and to depend on welfare assistance. . . .

A national television audience will see her shatter the stereotype that growing up in a home where both parents abused drugs means you are destined for a life on the streets and on the dole.

Not Ginger Childs.

“People told me I can’t succeed because what I was going through,” Childs said Friday. When she became pregnant last year, some family members told her to just drop out of school.

But she stayed, finding solace and strength in books and in her schoolwork.

Because if I could read, I could do anything. . . .

Ginger is carrying the torch a quarter of a mile because a Jordan High counselor submitted the essay to a scholarship program that was looking for hard-luck youngsters to run in the Olympic torch relay to Atlanta.

Ginger has continued to earn high grades and raise an infant.

“I was trying to prove them wrong,” she said as she cradled her 4-month-old baby Rakila in Jordan High’s infant child care center.

I thought of all the possibilities: a house with my own back yard, a car, a nice neighborhood where I would not have to worry about shootings in the night time. . . .

“She’s been denied a lot,” said her mother, Dianne Childs, who acknowledges her own drug abuse but says she has been clean for the last five years. “She had been dealt a bad hand. But she’s taking a lemon and making lemonade.”

I have witnessed many people around me, people who were not successful, fall victim to the sensation of escaping their world of troubles into drug abuse. . . .

Ginger and her two younger brothers--an infant and a 3-year-old--were removed from the home by county workers when Ginger was 8. They were sent to live for three years with a succession of relatives and foster parents. Ginger said that even when she lived at home, her parents’ neglect forced her to act like an adult to help raise her younger brothers, including a third who was born when she was 11.

Both parents had trouble keeping a job, but they were never violent toward their children and tried to hide their drug and alcohol use from them, Dianne Childs said. Ginger still credits her mother with encouraging her love of reading.

I read hours at a time, any book I could get my hands on. . . .

It was the prolonged loss of their children that convinced Dianne Childs and her husband, Billy, to sober up. Dianne Childs said she had been drinking since she was 4, growing up in a broken home in Compton. Billy Childs said he was plagued by alcoholism. Both parents say they have won their battles against abuse, but that has not eased the family’s pain. The mother worries that her children will repeat her mistakes.

I thought that if I could stay in school, without constantly moving, I could get good grades and get into a good college, eventually getting a good job. Then all my troubles would be gone because I would have found a way out. A way out of the chaos....

Her father’s co-workers at the Watts Multipurpose Community Center, where he is business manager, refer to Ginger as “our little celebrity.” Her principal, Etta McMahan, read the essay over the public address system.

“Even though these students live in the projects, they are intelligent,” McMahan said. “Sometimes they need that extra push. You can’t give up on them.”

Ginger’s classmates believe that her opportunity to carry the torch will counter negative stereotypes of Watts.

“We’re not just about gangbanging and drive-by shooting,” said junior Ana Pacheco, 17, who is in Ginger’s English class.’

“I’m glad someone from our neighborhood is doing something like this,” said Doniell Spencer, 17, also a junior. She said people from other parts of the city have told her they expect gunfire to erupt on every street corner when they drive into Watts.

“It’s not as serious as what they have seen,” Spencer said.

I live to fulfill this dream. To find a way out. . . .

In June, Ginger will graduate from Jordan High. In the fall she will begin college at Cal State Dominguez Hills. The organization sponsoring her as a torch-bearer, the Beat the Odds Achievement Council, created by KNBC-TV, Channel 4, has set up a college fund in her name at Glendale Federal Bank.

She is focused not only on college, she says, but on remaining a symbol to her brothers, now 6, 8 and 11.

I want to show them that they don’t have to accept this way of life but can determine their own fate. Through my commitment to others, I want to be a role model for my community.