OAKLAND - When Markel Abram walks in his West Oakland neighborhood, his 6-foot-9-inch frame is hard to miss. He gets a steady stream of shouts and honking horns. People are saying hello.

Abram, 25, has lived in West Oakland his entire life, except for a year in Wyoming for college. He knows his neighborhood has a reputation for violence and crime, and he acknowledges that friends and relatives have been in jail or killed.

But it’s also home to thousands of people, each trying move forward with their lives despite the problems that exist there. “This is a nice place to live,” he said. “People make it seem like a bad place to live, but it’s really not.”

West Oakland can be a violent place. There have been more than 120 murders in Oakland this year, and about 17 have occurred in the neighborhood, according to Janet Patterson, 52, chair of the Council of Acorn Residents.

In fact, said Patterson - who is also Markel Abram’s mother - so many young people have died over the years that it has become commonplace to attend funerals.

“For us to say it’s easy to go to funerals - there’s something wrong with that,” she said.

Patterson believes that businesses and government working with the community can play a role in improving the situation. “They’re spending more money on trying to bury folks than to help them to live,” she said.

Most who don’t live or work in West Oakland know it only from the few minutes it takes to cruise over the neighborhood on a freeway or BART. And what they see are houses pressed against an industrial zone that stretches to the massive Port of Oakland. What they don’t see are places like the Acorn Housing Complex, where Patterson lives. And they don’t see the corner.

At the intersection of 8th Street and Adeline sits Green Valley Foods. Young African American men wearing white T-shirts and baggy blue jeans are usually standing on the corner in front of it. They talk and joke and yell greetings to passing cars.

Many say the people on the corner are wasting time, but Abram points out that they don’t have jobs. “They’re not hoodlums. They’re just out there hanging out.”

He says some of them have simply made bad choices, but that they can improve their lives if someone would just help them. “If they had a job, work, that whole corner would be empty,” he said.

“I’m no different from anybody out there,” Abram said. “We all bleed the same blood. We all dress alike. But I refuse to just hang out and do nothing. When I see an opportunity in my face, I’m going for it.”

Abram currently works as a community outreach leader for the West Oakland Marketplace Advancement Company, which is involved in the operation of the nearby Gateway shopping center. He is applying for a position at the NUMMI auto plant in Fremont.

He credits family and friends for motivating him to take advantage of opportunities - including two brothers who have been in and out of jail. “I’m not having that,” he said of their experiences, which have pushed him to go in the other direction.

Others who live in the area agree that the neighborhood needs more positive role models.

“Sometimes you just need to reach out,” said Ishmael Williams, 34. Williams, a life-long West Oakland resident, said he has never seen the level of violence that exists now. He is one of the people who stopped to talk to Abram on the street. Abram credits him as another positive influence on his life.

Williams believes local youth need to hear a positive message from people from their own community who they know and will listen to. Those people could effectively encourage others to stay in school or get a GED.

“Once you accomplish and achieve one goal, that will inspire you to the next goal,” he said. But, he added, people need help reaching that first goal.

Williams said the community also needs places for recreation like Boys Clubs and gyms. It needs a forum to talk out conflicts. And it needs jobs. Williams, a certified carpenter, is himself unemployed.

What Williams described echoes a plan unveiled recently at the Acorn complex by state Senator Don Perata (D-Oakland).

The plan is designed to employ local residents as peacekeepers to help resolve conflicts in neighborhoods like West Oakland, Fruitvale, Elmhurst, and Richmond’s Iron Triangle. It also provides for more after-school and evening recreation and will employ and train 50 individuals recently released from jail.

Perata and local community organizations are working to secure funds for the program, estimated at about $1 million per neighborhood each year.

Many voiced optimism about the plan, including Janet Patterson. She said that this plan is different because it offers specific skills, benefits, and jobs: “I’m not coming to you with a bag of dreams. You know: ‘I wish you would get off drugs, I wish you would go and get a job’What am I going to offer you, a wish?”

Marilyn Washington Harris, another Acorn resident and founder of the Khadafy Foundation For Non-Violence, also supports the plan. The solution to Oakland’s violence, she said, is “the million-dollar question.”

“I’m just dumb enough to know that I don’t have all the answers. But I’m smart enough to know that I have my piece,” Harris, 51, said. Her piece includes helping families who lose children to violence on everything from getting flowers for the funeral and delivering eulogies to figuring out what benefits the family is entitled to.

Until six years ago, Harris avoided anything to do with death, said Patterson, who has been friends with Harris for 24 years. She turned away from hearses the way some people change direction when a black cat crosses their path. But all that changed in the summer of 2000.

That was when Harris’s son, Khadafy Washington, was murdered. He was 18.

Harris didn’t want anything to do with her son’s funeral.

“If you don’t do no more (funerals), you got to do Khadafy’s,” Patterson told her at the time.

“And she’s been doing them ever since,” Patterson added.

Harris thinks she has kept with it because it makes her feel closer to her son’s death.

The hearses and dead bodies didn’t change after Khadafy died. “I changed,” she said.

Both Patterson and Harris agreed that when any young person is killed, the whole community loses a child.

This was especially true when Harris lost her son. Patterson felt she’d lost a son, as well. Khadafy Washington was a constant presence in Patterson’s home because he was Markel Abram’s best friend.

Abram said he hasn’t really gotten over it.