Settling in for summer in a land beyond the deadly city

By Devonte Dixon

The first day here at Lorenzo R. Smith school was kind of exciting, but also kind of boring. Then I met some real nice people, though I thought some of them were kind of uptight.

We did a lot of things like switch classes and eat lunch. We even went to the school’s library. That’s when I met more new faces, some of them familiar. We had to do reports on anything we wanted. I chose to write about the summer here in this small town about an hour’s drive south of Chicago.

Summer here is way different from Chicago because there are a lot of things you could do in the big city that you couldn’t do here, like pop firecrackers. Out here, that popping sound of firecrackers might actually be gunshots. But out here, guns are used mostly for killing animals, not people.

In Chicago, people use guns to kill people.

(Editor's note: In Chicago this year, 27 Chicago Public School students reportedly have been murdered, mostly by gun violence—a continuing story with rippling effects for some students here. Posters like that shown in the photo are the work of an anti-violence campaign and have been posted in neighborhoods across Chicago.)