While living in New York City, U.S.A. for 10 years was a fun experience for Military B.R.A.T. Kennedy Brown, she didn’t want to leave, but had no choice. 

Brown was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.A. For 10 years, she experienced a life of riding the metro train and walking to school. This was at a young age where parents should be taking their children to school. 

In her case, no. 

THE BIG MOVE

Brown was born with many ethnicities: Black, Colombian and Italian. All her life, she has identified most with her Colombian culture, but she couldn’t really find others like her because she wasn’t in Brooklyn for long. 

Her dad, who’s in the U.S. military, had to move to Fort Banning, Ga., an Army base near the city of Columbus.

“It was a whole different world for me when I moved there,” she says. 

The lifestyle — civilian and military — is different, the view is different, the people are different in Georgia. Brown had seen the trees that take over almost all the land. She had seen the people who were mostly overweight. Also, she has seen there wasn’t much diversity, aside from black, white, and hispanic people. 

FITTING IN AS A MILITARY B.R.A.T.

Brown didn’t know how she was going to fit in with anyone. Columbus is the third-largest city in Georgia. There, the population is split between white and black with a very little percentage of hispanic culture.

Brown went to Faith Middle School, where it was really hard for her to make friends.

“Everyone was in clicks, they didn’t really meet with new people,” she says. 

Eventually, Brown started making friends as school progressed and she started to pick up on the way people lived in Georgia. Parents always picked up their kids from school and dropped them off. There was never a day a kid went to school alone. 

She realized their accents were southern, or a bit slang and coming from Brooklyn, they spoke with more of a combination of the words and not sounded out. The biggest difference she saw was the way people ate. 

“People in Georgia eat very unhealthy food,” she says. “They eat tons of BBQ, fried chicken, and a lot of fast food.”

Brown noticed that she started to eat some of their BBQ a lot more than she usually would and wanted to control it. In her time in Georgia, she realized she had to blend in if she wanted to make friends. 

THE UNFORTUNATE ONE

Brown might be from New York, but she felt as if her life was going to be in Georgia forever. It didn’t discourage her as she started to conform with the people she was around. Then things changed for her as two years went by and it was time for her father to move again.

She felt as if someone was playing with her life and how she was trying to make a home out of where she was living. Experiencing the soul food, and the young living, she just couldn’t make it her new lifestyle. 

Brown grasped some new things to add to her character and her life, but it would be a lot different when they were moved to Texas.

Check out Part 2 of Brown’s story tomorrow.

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