Hello everyone. My name is Steve Johnson, I’m 19 years old and I am the library assistant here at Abundant Life Foundation. I am a native islander of Roatán.
I began as a scholarship recipient with the Abundant Life Foundation. That scholarship allowed me to continue on pursuing my dream of becoming a systems engineer. I learned a lot and gained a lot of new skills through the scholarship, skills that brought me to become an official worker here at Los Sueños: the Dreams Library and Computer Center. When I began working here, it was for me, it was a drastic transition, transitioning to new things that I was not adjusted to in my previous school life. But then I had the concept of what I was coming into. So when I began here at the library, it taught me how to be more responsible with my time and the way I work and how I work. The first six months was like adaptation for me. It was hard, yes, but I got used to it. And me getting more and more used to it, I began loving it, as in loving the work we do, helping others and helping the community.
Here at the Abundant Life Foundation, I’m not only a library assistant, I’m also the IT guy, as we would say. And I also lead the program of the computer class. In the basic computer class, we have kids and adults, to whom I’ve taught computers. We take them in with warm hands and we teach them on what they’re passionate about.
Because why? I also was in that position that I wanted to learn about computers, but I didn’t have the opportunity until when I met up with the Abundant Life Foundation.
And along the way, the Abundant Life Foundation has taught me a lot of life skills that I applied today and applied to my job. And those same life skills lead a lot of kids of the communities to look up to me as a role model because they say a lot they want to be like me. I’ll tell them, “No, I don’t want you to be like me I want you to be better than me” and they say they want to get more involved. But then they have class and at the end I tell them, “okay you study hard and keep on moving forward no matter what happens keep on moving forward because no matter how many dark days we have we need the dark days to appreciate the brighter ones.”
Thank you very much to the Abundant Life Foundation for the opportunity that you have given me for me to pursue my dream as a system engineer.