Students Rising Above

EAST PALO ALTO (CBS 5) ― Gabby Trujillo's earliest memories are of living in a garage. She would climb into bed at night and wait for the mice to appear. She describes it in an almost fairytale kind of way. She wrote, "The night I moved in, I saw one running swiftly across the room… I always wanted to see it again."

"Gabby's positive take on the most difficult of circumstances is her trademark," says her College Readiness teacher, Jennifer Foster, at Eastside College Preparatory School, in East Palo Alto. "I think that speaks to Gabby's ability to find wonder in unusual places and just is emblematic of her great joy in life."

Gabby is the child of immigrants who has grown up poor in East Palo Alto, and the tougher neighborhoods on the peninsula. Her father left the family early in her life, and her mother who spoke no English, had to raise the three children on her own. She worked morning until night, cleaning houses. As Gabby got older, she would work with her mom on the weekends.

"She speaks about it with great joy, that this was a wonderful time she had with her mother," noted Foster. "She does not see this as a hardship and instead saw this as an opportunity to help this most important person in her life."

It was also Gabby's first look at the life outside of East Palo Alto. She remembers the first home she visited with her mother. She said, "It was a two story house with a lot off windows, and after living in a garage, which was the size of their bathroom, I was just amazed." It triggered other feelings too. "When I was young, I did feel a little embarrassed because my mom would clean houses. My mom's bosses would leave small notes sometimes, saying: Maria, do this, or clean the windows," Gabby said.

Now, there is no embarrassment, and the family lives in a tidy townhouse of their own, built by Habitat for Humanity.

But Gabby's worries didn't end with a stable home. Her mother developed Endometrial Cancer, in her sophomore year of high school. Although she had medical insurance, it did not cover all the bills. "She took maybe a week off each for both surgeries", Gabby said. "She would say that she had to keep working so we could have everything we needed, and that if something were to ever happen to us, she would want us to keep going with school and graduate."

It was a devastating time. Gabby held her mother's hand at the hospital, listened, when her mom spelled out what to do if the worst happened, and did the heavy lifting for her mom at work. "She absolutely needed to be there to help her mother", Foster said.

Gabby interpreted, as we asked her mother, Maria Navas, about it. "She says I acted very strong and composed in front of her, but I would do that so she would continue feeling positive.... We feel each other's positivity. We're both very positive people."

The discussions began to include a consideration of who could take the kids in, if her mother were to pass away. Her mother talked to the teachers at school about it. "She was trying to prepare Gabby for that possibility", Foster said.

When her mother began to recover, the community at Eastside College Prep felt the relief as well as Gabby's family. And the focus is back on school and college. Her mother, through Gabby, said, "It's important for her because it's an opportunity she didn't have. She always wants us to have a better life than she did."

"I'm excited for college," Gabby said, "because I know I will meet people not like me, who might not understand my story when I tell them at first. So it will be good and challenging to tell them about my story, and let them know what it's like growing up in East Palo Alto and Menlo Park."

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