Peeling back the layers

Adam Cram still remembers the moment the idea hit him.

He was sitting down to write an essay for the Optimist Club contest, turning over a prompt about service and community in his mind, when he started thinking about onions.

“Because onions have layers,” Adam said. “And community is just like an onion.”

The metaphor became the backbone of an essay that recently earned the Mesilla Valley Leadership Academy eighth grader first place in the Optimist Club District 19 essay contest, a $2,500 scholarship and publication in “The Optimist” magazine.

But for Adam, the essay was never just about winning. It was about trying to understand people.

In the essay, Adam compares communities to onions — layered, complicated and often misunderstood. He peels through different “layers” of his own life: Scouts, church, school and service projects that have shaped the way he sees the world. One of the moments that stayed with him most came during a cleanup project along a ditch.

“While we were going through, we found a lot of hypodermic needles,” Adam said. “It made me reflect while writing about it and think that some people in my community are struggling. I want to start thinking about what I can do to help them.”

That instinct to reflect, not just on what happened, but on what it means, comes through repeatedly in conversation with Adam.

“I also wanted to go from like the 1,000-foot view,” he said. “Okay, this happened. But how does this affect me? How does this affect my community? Do I still see my community differently?”

The essay moves through several corners of Adam’s life: filling shoeboxes with toys and hygiene supplies for children in Palomas, Mexico; reading to young children at Barnes & Noble; and helping serve meals during Second Sunday Supper at Camp Hope.

Adam said those experiences changed him over time, especially the meals at Camp Hope, where he has visited since he was about 5 or 6 years old.

“When I was young, I was unsure about this community,” he wrote in the essay. “But the more I have sat with them and listened to their stories, the more human they become to me.”

In conversation, he expands on that thought.

“A lot of people are scared of them,” Adam said. “It’s like, ‘Lock your door, put the windows up.’ But they’re not mean and scary and awful people. They’re nice. They’re funny. They like to have conversation.”

Those interactions changed how he thinks about people not only at Camp Hope, but everywhere else in life.

“Just being nice and empathetic and saying hi, it doesn’t make them feel like they’re the problem or the flea or the rat in society,” he said.

Adam’s mother, Rebecca, said Adam’s writing process usually starts with brainstorming and mapping things out in outlines before the essay gradually finds its center.

“He has his main ideas,” she said. “But then as he goes, sometimes the thing that he’s added to the paragraph is the piece that he kind of homes in on, and that becomes the paragraph.”

For Adam, one of those moments centered on reading. Though he describes himself as “not really that big of a reader,” he keeps returning to the idea of literacy and encouragement after noticing classmates who struggle academically.

“I care about all of them,” he said. “Some people definitely struggle with reading. It’s just like, wow, I care for them. I want to help see them succeed.”

That mix of earnestness and humor also surfaces throughout the essay. Adam intentionally included lighter moments, including a callback to one of his favorite scenes from the movie, Shrek.

“One of the things I like to do in my writing is adding a comedic piece,” he said. “I hope readers can reflect on their own community too.”

Adam still laughs about ending an award-winning essay with a quote from the movie.

“Ogres are like onions,” the character Shrek says. “Onions have layers.”

For Adam, the joke worked because it was true. Behind every classmate struggling to read, every child waiting for a Christmas shoebox and every unsheltered person sitting down for a meal at Camp Hope, he has learned there is always another layer worth understanding.

And for an eighth grader who once thought essays were just another school assignment, that realization turned into something bigger than a contest win.