First Week of Project

For the past week Andrew and I have been at 2100 Lakeside doing interviews for our documentary. Over all we did a total of 17 interviews, which was amazing and many more than I thought we were going to get in the beginning. It gives us lots of good material for the documentary, we have yet to figure out how long the video will be probably around 10 minutes at this point. But we have many more interviews to go. This week we will be heading over to North Point Transitional Housing to meet with our main sponsor, Ed Gemerchak. Then the week after we will go over to the West side to West Side Catholic Center. Anyway, every story that we heard so far has been inspiring. Most men have gone through some kind of trauma in their past to end up at the shelter. Also many men suffer from some sort of mental disability from bipolar syndrome to post traumatic stress disorder. It was very interesting to discover the number of men who had attending at least some portion of college. One man even had a law degree from Case Western but after discovering that he has bipolar syndrome his life took a turn for the worse.  On the flip side we have heard many stories from people who did not complete high school but rather went into the work force. Many of these situations resulted in a bad family life at home, parents who didn't really care. Or possibly a family with just a single mother trying to take care of several children. Obviously the work load for the mother would be tremendous. We also heard a story from a man who stopped going to school in just the 4th grade. Those are just a few little short pieces of the some of the stories that we heard over the past week. Needless to say, I am excited for the next two weeks of project and to keep collecting people's stories!