Alana Ramadan

Interviewer: 00:02 May I have your first and last name with spelling, please?
Alana Ramadan: 00:05 Okay. My first name is Alana, A-L-A-N-A, the last name is
Ramadan, R-A-M-A-D-A-N.
Interviewer: 00:15 He’s going to give you the map.
Interviewer: 00:16 Do you currently or have you ever lived near this part of North
Minneapolis? If so, how long?
Alana Ramadan: 00:24 Yes, 37 years. So I live just a few blocks from where I live over
on 14th Avenue by North High School. So I pretty much have
lived there all my adult life. And actually my grandparents lived,
like three blocks one way and one block, so I’m like, live within
five blocks of where my grandparents lived and my parents
grew up.
Interviewer: 00:58 I think that’s nice. That’s nice.
Alana Ramadan: 00:59 Yeah.
Interviewer: 01:00 Thinking back from when you first came to this area today, what
changes have you seen? They can be positive or negative.
Alana Ramadan: 01:10 Well, I would say that the biggest change would be that people
don’t take as much pride in their property, and there’s … I feel
like the young people, a lot of them have kind of gone down the
wrong road. I’ve seen some of my friends move out of the
neighborhood because of violence or whatever. And there’s just
a lot of … I mean, actually I shouldn’t say there’s a lot of
shooting, but there’s enough shooting to give North
Minneapolis a bad name.
Alana Ramadan: 01:49 I work in North Minneapolis, I pray here. I work with children at
a school in North Minneapolis. I guess I was never scared away,
but I know other people feel like people don’t care. In our
neighborhood we generally had, like most of the people who
lived there were home-owners. So now it’s kind of getting back,
so it’s almost like it was a cycle. Because when my children grew
up you could go outside and play and play with the neighbors
and all that. And then it got to a point where I didn’t see very
many children out. I didn’t see very many families. But I think
it’s changing now that people are actually moving back to North
Minneapolis.
Alana Ramadan: 02:33 As far as the schools, when my children were growing up they
had, like Willard was science and technology. So they had
Willard and then they had … I mean that was, it’s right over
here. I can’t think of it all of a sudden. Franklin. So you had
Willard, you had Franklin, and then you had North. And then
they had Summatech. And so I think, you know, I’ve seen
schools close, and then they open back up, and I don’t know. I
just feel like the education has gone down as far as what our
children are offered.
Alana Ramadan: 03:12 And then families. I think there are not as many families that are
living in the area.
Interviewer: 03:23 What do you feel caused the changes you’ve seen in the years?
Alana Ramadan: 03:29 I think there’s a decay of … Well, I think with a lot of, well
there’s always been a lot of, I don’t want to say sex, but there’s
always been a lot of … I mean because when I was growing up it
was like a lot of young people and they’re smoking weed where
now there’s really dangerous drugs, where you could have a
joint laced with something that could kill you. I think that just
society, the moral fiber of society has gone down.
Alana Ramadan: 04:03 And even when I think about families, like when I was raising my
children we had two parent families or whatever. And I think
even with my own family, I ended up getting a divorce and I
mean most of my children were grown, but I think when you’d
have people … I mean the amount of money people are … even
though people are making more money, it takes more money to
make it. So it used to be you could work at one job, but now