Antigueño Street Kid Earns US Diploma, Becomes Artist
Ernesto Atkinson escaped a life of living on the streets of La Antigua Guatemala, but he hasn’t escaped his roots. Rather, he uses them to influence his art. An excerpt from INFORUM:
When Ernesto Atkinson takes the podium as the featured speaker for tonight’s God’s Child fundraising dinner, his adoptive father will be filled with both pride and a feeling of mortality…
Atkinson laughs, acknowledging that at 28, Neto is hardly a boy anymore. But when the two met, Neto was not only a child, but one with no future.
Then, Neto was starving and living on the streets of Antigua, Guatemala. His birth father had already died of alcoholism and as the oldest of five children, whatever money he made on the street went back to his mom to feed the family. Often the family lived on the equivalent of $5 a week.
“It was very rough,” Neto says. “I know I needed to change. I came to my father, and he opened the door to me. I wanted him to help me get a better education.” Atkinson stepped in and found homes for everyone, but Neto bounced from foster home to foster home. Seeing that Neto did better at Atkinson’s own home, he took the child in. At that point he was 10 years old and only 30 pounds, Atkinson recalls. When Neto was 15, Atkinson made the adoption formal and legal.
“The reason he didn’t (fit in at foster homes) is because he was the oldest, smartest and most active,” Atkinson says, recalling how Neto not only watched out for his blood family, but also his street family.
“In effect, I didn’t just adopt Neto, I adopted him and his 25 street kids,” Atkinson explains.
Neto moved to Bismarck in the late 1990s and graduated from North Dakota State University in 2007 after studying art.
“We miss Ernesto. He was a dynamo,” says his former painting professor, Kim Bromley. “He has a little bit of a kid in him and allows that to come out in his artwork.”
Neto returned to NDSU on Wednesday to paint in the Memorial Union Gallery.
His pieces use paints, spray paints, markers and pastels (“anything I can use”) to combine his Mayan heritage with American modern touches, “full of color and emotion,” he explains.
Read the entire article by clicking here: Child Saved from Streets Carries on Project’s Work
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