Hello, Moth Family. Have you listened to our new podcast, Grown Yet? Grown, that's GROWN,

is a podcast filled with true stories all about the joys and pains of growing up.

Listen with a young person in your life, or by yourself to hear Moth Stories,

storyteller interviews, and audio diaries from young voices that tackle family dynamics,

heartbreak, culture, mental health, and so much more. If you love listening to Moth Stories,

then share Grown with a young person in your life. Find it by searching GROWN on all major podcast

platforms.

This is Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Katherine Burns, and today we're going to hear stories about

the ties that bind. It's a topic that seems to come up a lot at the Moth, dealing with our families,

a subject that generates story after story. First up, the writer Sharif El-Meckey. He told this story

in the community workshop we did with the William Penn Foundation and Funders Network. Here,

live from Philadelphia, Sharif El-Meckey. Good evening. From early on, I knew my parents and

teachers had the expectation that I was going to be a revolutionary. My earliest dreams were about

protest and civil unrest and boycotts. They should have been nightmares. I was a kid,

but they were just dreams of a child who knew he was supposed to be a revolutionary.

I mean, my parents met and got married in the Black Panther Party.

I was enrolled in a school that was founded by activists and revolutionaries. It was called

Nathamu-Sasa. It was in Queen Lane. We didn't have a gym at that school. We had martial arts.

And Bob Achauga, my martial arts teacher, would always say, if you're going to speak the truth,

you got to be able to defend the truth. By the age of 10, I had met some of the most amazing

revolutionaries who were not locked up and still alive. Angela Davis,

Sonia Sanchez, members of the Wilmington-10,

...