Angel - Off to Berkeley???

My name is Angel, I come from an American-Mexican family and I live in a one-bedroom apartment with my sister, aunt and 5 other people. My neighborhood is the place your mother tells you not to go, and my neighbors are the people she says you should not see. My own mother never warned me of these things because she became a drug addict when I was in kindergarten and ran off with a man. She came back a year later to kidnap my older sister and I. She hid us in the most dilapidated building I’d ever seen, in Tijuana, Mexico, with a different strange man. She did not feed us anything but a few cookies and my sister and I were really dirty and sick. My dad found us and brought us back to a place we called home for a short time, until he met another woman and left us. Since then, I have been living with my aunt trying to survive on her low paying job. I love my family, but not one of them is living their dream.I resolved to show my family that what you are born into does not dictate where you will end up. I have worked hard at school, I am in the International Baccalaureate program and I stand proudly among the top 10% of my class. I have received letters and invitations for campus visits from every prestigious school you could think of. For someone who is aiming as high as he can, these invitations are golden. Unfortunately, my financial and familial situations, do not allow me the luxury of visiting these campuses to make important decisions that I need to make.A Bridge For Kids helped Angel find a sponsor who has made it possible for Angel to visit Harvard, UC Berkeley, Brown and University of Rochester and apply to all of his “dream” colleges.