“I’m living a good life. I’m a business owner. A lot of hotels say, ‘Come shine shoes for us. We will pay you better.’ I tell them: ‘Why would I do that? I am free.'”
(Brandon Stanton)
"When I was fifteen, I was raped by three boys while competing at a gymnastics tournament. I was so ashamed, that I stood on a train track, and waited for the train to come. At the last moment, I tried to jump away. I woke up after a month. It was the middle of the night, and I could immediately tell that something was missing. I started feeling all over my body, and that’s when I realized that I’d lost my arm. Now I counsel teenagers who have been diagnosed with HIV. I’m normally the first to meet with them after they get their results. I try to explain to them that there’s a way out of even the most impossible situations."
(Brandon Stanton )
"I’m studying law. My dream is to be a judge one day. Too many people in this country are only in prison because they were too poor to defend themselves. When I’m a judge, I’ll look only at the facts, and not the person.”
(Brandon Stanton)
"What are your hopes for them?"
"We left our hopes back in Syria."
(Brandon Stanton)
I found her crushing up rocks and loading them onto the back of a truck, for which she got paid just a few dollars a day. But she also told me she was enrolled in school, and had high ambitions. “Maybe I’ll be President,” she said, laughing."What would you do if you were?" I asked."I’d take all the children off the street, bring them somewhere, and teach them," she said. Afterwards, she wrote down her name and email, so I could send her the picture. Her name was ‘Innocent Gift.’
(Brandon Stanton)
"I gave my three year old daughter some worthless coins, and jokingly told her that she was rich. She went and hid the coins away, and I forgot all about them. Around the same time, my oldest daughter got a bunch of money from her aunts and uncles for her birthday. A few months later, we needed money for food, and I asked my oldest daughter if we could use some of her birthday money. She refused. I almost started crying, because I thought then that I had completely failed as a parent. But suddenly, my youngest daughter appeared, and gave me back the handful of coins that I had given her."
(Brandon Stanton)
"He found me and my son on New Year’s Eve, sleeping in a construction site. We’d been forced out on the street after my husband abandoned us. He said: ‘You shouldn’t live like this, come home with me.’ He let us live with him for months, and he never asked me for a thing, and he very good to my son. Sometimes I’d come home and find him carrying my son on his shoulders. After a few months, we developed romantic feelings for each other."
(Brandon Stanton)
"I row 16 kilometers per day. A few weeks ago, I was in Germany for the Junior World Championships. My goal is to make the Olympics one day. But it can be tough to compete with the European countries. We don’t have the gym equipment that they have. And they practice with actual racing boats. We only get to use the racing boats during the race."
(Brandon Stanton)
"What’s the most romantic thing he’s ever done?"
"He asked my kids for permission to marry me."
(Brandon Stanton)
"We had our first day of kindergarten yesterday, and I’m already starting to mentally prepare myself for the first boyfriend."
(Brandon Stanton)