Building Take Down - by Courtney Lipp

On October 14^th at around noon there was what I believe a big deal on the Spokane Falls Community College. A construction company was destroying and taking away our old administrations building. Now I know that we just built a new building named Falls Gateway, but why were they getting rid of that one.

I asked a worker on the site and he said that they were going to just build something different. I never saw anything wrong with that old building and I don’t understand why they couldn’t just upgrade the building, but I don’t work construction so I wouldn’t be able to understand completely.

 

 Right now this site looks like a giant trash field and is just such an eye sore, so my thought was to photograph it while I have the chance. The workers had no idea that I was photographing them nor did they care, they just wanted to get there job done.

Who Is Zachary Ryan? - by Courtney Lipp

Eleven years old and still misunderstood, strangers look at him and wonder what is wrong with him. The answer is simple nothing is wrong with him, there is only something wrong with the people that choose not to understand him. His name is Zachary Ryan and he is different from other eleven-year-old boys and will always be different.

He has a lot of different habits that his family is glad that he out grew, like the one habit that would occur anytime he entered anyone’s house he would strip down to his birthday suit and go take a shower. His grandma says “I am so glad he out grew that”… Another thing that makes Zachary unique is that he has a great imagination and love for shopping. The other day his grandma picked him up from school and Zachary said “grandma lets go explore in the jungle” than his grandma said “we can’t go to the jungle because I don’t have enough gas” then he finally talked his grandmother down to taking him to the dollar store because that wasn’t so far.

Zachary has a specific schedule that he keeps by and no one can change it or else he would sometimes get upset. Monday through Friday he goes to school and when he gets home grandma is there to hang out with him, and he seems to want to always do something with her. Every other Saturday he goes to his caregiver Polly’s house and they hang around there or they go to the grocery store. Every Sunday Zachary goes to grandmas to look at newspaper ads, and than he comes back later and has what he picks for dinner. An example of what he would say to his mom is “we will go to grandma’s Sunday and have fried chicken for dinner”.

One time Zachary’s mother threw a party for Zach at his favorite park and because it was located on the day he was supposed to be with Polly (even though Polly was there), he was not happy. He made his mind up and wanted to go to Polly’s home while Polly wanted to party, so they discussed and decided that they would leave at 3 o’clock sharp. Zachary than went and played and every twenty minutes he would come back up to us and look at someone’s watch to see if it was three yet.

The last time I babysat Zach, we were supposed to carve the pumpkin together (that was a joke). I go to carve the top off and right then Zach looks at me and says “no thank you”, I said “what about carving your pumpkin” and he says “no thank you”. So in the end we compromised and I had him draw out the face for the pumpkin and I carved it for him. He had told me to make it look happy so instead of doing the mouth he drew, I carved a crescent moon shape. Now every time his grandma is over he will run to the porch and look outside, his grandma would then ask “what are you looking at” and he would just say “pumpkin”.

This eleven-year-old boy has autism, and will always have autism. Autism is known as a development disorder that affects how the brain works, this shows up with in the first three years of life. Zachary was diagnosed with autism when he was almost two years old, and as you may have seen his autism has shown greatly.

Complicated at times but Zachary’s disorder makes him who he is and that’s different from the next human being. He is unique, and the perfect candidate to document. He has the biggest support team on his side, and even though he doesn’t have a father he has a family that loves him for the way he is. Zachary is the smartest eleven-year-old boy I have ever met and I know that he has a great future ahead of him.

What Is My Home? - by Courtney Lipp

The year was 2003 and my location at the time was West Richland, a small town in Washington State. This place is named for those normal people that needed to know where my legally bonded house was ten years ago. This was the place I lived at when I was nine years old, but it wasn’t my home, my home was nothing like that place.

Home in my eyes is a place of happiness and safety, so why wasn’t this house in Tri-Cities my home. What was my home? At this point in my life my parents were always bickering which later lead to the divorce, but I’m getting ahead of my self.

Also at this time of my life my baby sister was two years old, which meant that everything was hers. So I a little girl lost all the old attention and lost all self-esteem. This was also the point of my life where my iron levels had received a higher place value, which had caused my body to gain weight.

This meant kids at school started to look at me funny and most of them had decide that because I was different that they no longer wanted to be my friend. So not only was this a bad time of life for me it was also the best.

This time of life lead me to my home; my home is a playground that is located one block away from where my legal address was. My mother let me go there any time I wanted and if I didn’t ask my parents it wasn’t bad because they always knew where to find me. What made me so fond of this playground was that it was my moment of freedom.

This playground had a chain-linked fence surrounding it, which allowed me to know that no one bad could ever get in, making it a safe quiet place to be. While I was spending most of my time at that park I was the happiest nine-year-old girl ever.

I had been such a lonely girl that when it came down to another person I was never bothered. I had always thought to myself that when it came down to it, I believed that I would never ever have to play with another person in my life. So when I went to the park, the one thing that got my whole attention was something so simple named swing. Swing could take me quite anywhere I wanted to be and all I had to do was close my eyes and pump my legs, lifting higher and higher away from my problems and hoping to never have to go back, but I always had to press the brakes to go back to reality.

I always knew that when I had to get away from the world I would at all times have the swing to take me there. My home was a playground two blocks away from my legal address as a child, and now I don’t know where it is.