Kids these days often joke about “spirit animals.” This animal apparition is, according to the youth, a kind of metaphor for an animal that a person can identify with or whose personality is reflective of that animal’s traits.
If spirit animals exist, then Hannah Otto’s spirit animal is a porcupine. The Solomon High School senior has a tough demeanor and is quick to become defensive. But, that prickly exterior serves to both hide and protect a very soft, nurturing core.
“I really want to work with children,” Hannah says. “I would love to be a stay at home mom or to run a daycare one day.”
Hannah once wanted to be a veterinarian because she is an animal lover but knows that’s not the career field for her.
“I really love animals,” she explains. “But, I cannot stomach having to stab, or draw blood, or cut open animals--I just couldn’t do surgeries.”
To Hannah, animals and children are similar in their innocence, purity of heart, and need of nurturing.
“Part of the reason I want to have kids and be a stay at home mom has to do with the fact that I don’t really trust my generation to raise my children,” Hannah says, with characteristic bluntness.
Hannah is something of an old soul and this probably can be chalked up to two factors: the elderly and death.
She grew up in Bushton until moving to Salina in the fifth grade.
“Growing up, I was one of only five kids in Bushton,” she explained. “I was the only girl and I was bussed to Holyrood for school. Bushton was just almost all old people. I grew up around older people there and never got to hang out with other children that much.”
Although she is still technically a kid herself, Hannah has had plenty of experience in working with children. As the eldest of three, Hannah often helped care for her younger sister, Heather, and her younger brother, Joseph. Caring for her siblings also gave Hannah her first experience with death. A younger sister, Jessica, was born without a spleen and her heart both displaced on the right side and missing a valve.
“She wasn’t supposed to make it past birth, but she made it two months,” she explained.
This brush with death at a young age isn’t the only adversity Hannah has faced, but she is handling life at Solomon with aplomb.
“That girl could be the CEO of a company if she wanted to,” says Wendi Pratt, social worker for Solomon Schools. “She is here because she wants to be here. It’s pretty impressive, really.”
Hannah would just like to finish her senior year and has set her mind on graduating.
“I want to be remembered as somebody who was more adult than child,” Hannah says. “I want to be remembered as someone who got a lot of things done.”
Photo by Nicole Price
Editing by Perry Steele, Spencer Coup, and Taytum Anderson