AMANDA LYNN HILL


New Orleans, LA.

I have not had one big struggle that trumped all the rest. All my life struggles have had an immense impact one way of the other. I lost my mother, then my grandfather 10 months apart. Watching my mother deteriorate from cancer when I was 11 was the first traumatic event in my life. Then Hurricane Katrina came along 5 years later. We lost everything. My current struggle isn’t mine at all, but is my grandmother’s battle with breast cancer.

When I first met Soledad at the beginning of the documentary she was shooting “Children of the Storm” about the one year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I was in the lowest place in my life. After that documentary people came from around the country and my grandma and I were able to rebuild our lives.

After my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer, Soledad and Brad made sure that I would be able to finish out my final semester of nursing school, by granting me a scholarship. If she hadn’t come into my life five years ago I don’t know where I would be. It's unbelieveable that with all the odds stacked against me I will be able to sign my name Amanda Hill, RN BSN in a month. I plan to go to graduate school and hope to be able to pay it forward and help other children and young adults like myself in the near future.

 





SOLEDAD

“I met Amanda in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. I was doing a documentary called “Children of the Storm” and she was picked as one of the students who would tell her story of recovery in the year after the storm. Spike Lee helped us with the project—he handed out cameras to the kids and gave a tutorial on how to tell their life stories.

 

Amanda’s story was incredible and she was very diligent about shooting all that was happening around her. Amanda’s mother died when Amanda was just 11. In our documentary she took us to the place where her mom was buried—they couldn’t afford a headstone so Amanda would write—and then re-write—her mother’s birthdate and date of death on the cement slab at the cemetery.

 

She and her grandma struggled in ways that were sadly so typical for so many post-Katrina. And yet Amanda always moved forward—taking advantage of any opportunity and working hard to get ahead.

When were heard that her Grandmother’s breast cancer treatments might force Amanda out of school, the foundation stepped in to organize those treatments, and then help Amanda out financially—with tuition and some expenses. After all this time invested in this young woman there was NO WAY she was going to drop out right before she completed her degree!

 

We’re incredibly proud of Amanda—inspite of lots of tough circumstances she has never given up and rarely wallows in self-pity. She will make a fine nurse.”