When Shit Got Hard, I Stayed I Didn't Run! Straight out of Brownsville, Brooklyn

This powerful memoir will take you on an unforgettable journey to see through the author's eyes and experience life in a place called Brownsville, Brooklyn. This is a place referred to as the "jungle" because it's all about survival. It's a place where it's not normal for a young man to reach 25, and if he does, it's celebrated. Readers will feel the pain and understand what it takes to survive. The era was the 1990s, also known as the crack era. This book captures the full scope of human emotion – excitement, love, anger, sadness, happiness, and pain. Readers will feel as if they are right there, living it. There are lessons to be learned in this book. God uses us all as examples and the author's story is a powerful testimony.

No one chooses the life they are dealt. Everything in life comes down to how we respond to the circumstances we face. For the author, life involved frequent shootings and violence, as if she were living through a war. Life was filled with hardships and suffering. But she would see her life in dreams, and her soul knew that the dreams were God's way of communicating with her – bracing her, comforting her, and preparing her. Throughout this book, you will read about a young girl who begins to pay more attention to her dreams as they play out in real life. As you read and embark on this journey with the author, you'll see failure but also perseverance. You will see how God carried her through all the pain and hardships and led her with strength. You will see how God took a bunch of nobodies and turned them into somebodies in this world.

Joyce Bermudez comes from the gutter, Brownsville Brooklyn, a place that she calls the "jungle". From a child she would have dreams, some would probably call them nightmares. She would have dreams of shootings – many, many shootings. She would see herself in the dreams although she was a little girl. And from then she knew that God was preparing her for what was about to happen.

The dreams would not make sense to Joyce until she would come of age and live the dreams. They were clearly messages from God. She stopped crying about all the things that went wrong in her life and started writing about them. She wrote this book in hopes that her story and testimony would help somebody to get the strength and courage to be able to tell their story. Joyce hopes that her story will help people avoid many situations and not repeat her mistakes.