Lakareber Abe, Symetra Tour player
Not being able to really do much or travel anywhere (with the pandemic), my family and I were doing a lot of walking around the neighborhood. We would walk every morning. My dad (Daudi) would take pictures of wildlife – like birds, we have rabbits, just anything.
One morning my sister called me, and she was frantic. She’s in Michigan right now. She’s like, you need to find dad. I was like, OK what’s going on? I hadn’t walked with him that morning. She said some guy came out and was yelling at dad, telling him he was casing the neighborhood and called the cops on him. Here we are, living in a gated community. The gate is up. You can’t really get in before 9 or 10 a.m. I think it was 7:30.
No one in the neighborhood isn’t from the neighborhood. I find my dad, and he had kept walking. My mom went out to find him and lo and behold, here come the cops to check out the situation.
My parents are from Uganda. They were children of war. They came to the states basically as refugees at the end of the civil rights moment in the 1970s. They see all that and then to think it’s still happening. They’re still going through it. There are so many stories. Even to this day, with everything bubbling over, they are telling us more stories of different things that have happened to them. It’s been tough.
I think for a while when you’re younger, especially in the spaces that I’ve grown in, there are things your parents can shield you from. Right now, we’re dealing with police brutality, but I remember Trayvon Martin, I remember Sandra Bland and I remember Tamir Rice, who I think was younger than me when he was playing in a playground by himself.
It’s hard because this is like the past 10 years of my life. Every time it’s the same cycle of emotions. It’s watching parent lose their sons, their daughters and having to live it out on national TV, just trying to get someone to understand, and it’s like nobody understands. Sometimes you walk those things by yourself as well. You don’t always have someone around to relate to what’s going on, or ever stop to understand it. Everyone is upset, but do they realize it’s been happening for so long? We’ve been almost begging for help.