Anthony Florence

Hell's Heaven Anthony Florence

My life started in the ghetto of Roxbury, Massachusetts, a mile away from the drug-infested neighborhood where Bobby Brown came up. My father left our family when I was one. My mother had five children, one of whom died in early childhood. My mother struggled every day to feed us-I'm sure many times not feeding herself. A lot of our food and Christmas toys came from the government. Despite all her struggles, my mother did everything in her power to give me an academic edge. After I won the Boston Mayor's Award for academics when I graduated from the sixth grade, my mother colluded with a white family to put me on an academic and cultural Rocketship. This was the point where I had to begin to navigate my path mostly on my own, as my mother's knowledge and experience regarding my new world was very limited. All I could do was to try to hold on. I attended the University of Massachusetts and a computer electronics class at Benjamin Franklin Institute, where IBM hired me. After 20 years in the world of high technology, I became disillusioned with corporate life and moved with my family to Costa Rica, where I had the pleasure of meeting a man named Dr. Deepak Chopra, who contacted me and invited my wife and I to join him at his private lunch with the presidential candidate of Costa Rica during his one-day conference. How? People always ask me: "Why, after 17 years, did you return from the paradise of Costa Rica to the U. S.?" This is my true story.