J.K. Rowling once said “Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticized by fools,” and this really resonates with me as my family has always struggled with money. It was this state of poverty that has stayed with me my whole life and defined who I am today.
Some of my earliest memories were formed around our greatest struggles with poverty. During my elementary years we were cramped up in a small trailer; just my mom, my sister, and I. My parents had recently gotten a divorce and it fell to my mom to support two kids all on her own. She would work tirelessly all day, most of the time only seeing us at bedtime, I remember resenting the fact she was
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This included orientation which was a day for students to get acquainted with college life. Of course the only thing on my mind was finances. So I scheduled a meeting with financial aid expecting to hear numbers I would never be able to afford. It turned out that I spent so much time assuming poverty was a hole that could never be crawled out of that I failed to realize that it 's possible to get help. With our constant financial problems, I was able to get enough aid to cover my college education. Stress turned to joy and for the first time money was not the biggest thing on my mind.
After years of struggling with money, I was now able to concentrate on something else. College being free meant the only worry I had was doing my best so I could graduate in the future and finally get out of the cycle of poverty I had envisioned myself in for the rest of my life. It was a weight off my shoulders that freed me to do anything I could dream of. My focus was on the future and I knew I would be served well by the lessons I learned throughout my life watching my
Barbara Ehrenreich’s story, in her book “Nickel and Dimed,” was humbling to read. Her quote at the end of her book left me speechless. She states, “I grew up hearing over and over to the point of tedium that hard work was the secret to success: ‘Work hard and you’ll get ahead’ or ‘It’s hard work that got us where we are.’ No one ever said that you could work hard—harder even than you ever thought possible—and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt (220).’” When I first started to read this quote I thought it was going to be encouraging, but by the end my heart felt heavy for people like Ehrenreich that are stuck in poverty and can’t seem to get out, no matter how hard they work. It is such an eye opener to me because I have grown up hearing things such as “work hard to get what you want”, which is similar to what Ehrenreich has heard as well, yet Ehrenreich didn’t find this to be true. Being privileged and having parents that support my financially is something that I take for granted.
Poverty is a difficult and horrible way to grow up in life. It causes people to become stressed, and terrified of the world. It also demonstrates the ugly side of the world. When you ae in poverty. It causes people to become desperate and do horrendous things like murder, rape, and prostitution. But poverty can also produce strong, determined, and hopeful humans. In Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus by Carolina Maria de Jesus, we see the ambitious mother of three living the daily struggle of living in the poor favelas in Brazil. She provides the best life she can to her kids, while also perusing her dream of becoming a writer. In Testimony: Death of a Guatemala City by Victor Montejo, the readers follow the inspirational
I wasn’t poor but I wasn’t rich either, I was surrounded by an environment in which many people where in need of shelter and food because their families could not afford both. Just like poverty played a major role in my life, so did an ambitious and hardworking environment. Because those people I would see every day on the streets without food or a home, were the ones that had a bigger passion than anyone else, to one day be able to have a stable job and home for their family. This has shaped me to be who I am today, because I greatly appreciate what I have and take advantage of the opportunities I am given because not everyone is lucky enough to have what one
The Liz Murray’s lecture has far exceeds my expectation. She did a wonderful job with the book, but I think it was even more meaningful being able to listen to the author articulating her own story. Breaking Night and the lecture provide me with lots of valuable insights about life. I knew that poverty was a global epidemic, but I would have never thought that it would affect people in our country to that extent. Originally coming from a relatively undeveloped country myself, I am not too unfamiliar with the concept of poverty. I could not agree more when Liz Murray mentioned how poverty acts like a wall separating people in society. I think poverty in itself affects both the body and the mind. The body is deprived of its basic needs while the mind is
Hooks says, “It is better to be poor than to allow another person to assert power over you in ways that are dehumanizing and cruel” (435). Weather poor or rich everyone deserves and opportunity to be successful in life and shouldn’t be stereotyped. Everyone deserves the chance to be successful in life and have the same equal opportunities. Poverty is everywhere in this world some worse than others. Living in poverty once in life it can actually be a learning experience. To see and experience the struggle gives them not only a better understanding but appreciate what they have.
A major factor in the development of character through personal struggle is that it shows a person what they are willing to do to succeed. One example of this is the acclaimed author J.K. Rowling. She and her daughter suffered from poverty prior to, and during the beginning of writing the infamous Harry Potter series. She had to get undesirable jobs, and write in coffee shops without a computer or copy machine, which meant that she had to manually process each copy that she sent to publishers. Through every problem thrown at her, she persevered, and proved to herself and others that she would do anything to succeed and support her family. Everyone has limits that they can push, and lines
Everyone knows what the word poverty means. It means poor, unable to buy the necessities to survive in today's world. We do not realize how easy it is for a person to fall into poverty: A lost job, a sudden illness, a death in the family or the endless cycle of being born into poverty and not knowing how to overcome it. There are so many children in poverty and a family's structure can effect the outcome. Most of the people who are at the poverty level need some type of help to overcome the obstacles. There are mane issues that deal with poverty and many things that can be done to stop it.
Over the last 10 years or so, the way of looking at the concepts like poverty and social exclusion has changed by a million miles. More and more people are drawn towards the idea of thinking about such things in a more detailed manner so as to gain a deeper understanding of it. For that is the only way, we can actually move towards truly dealing with them, instead of being the bird that puts its most sincere efforts in trying to catch the horizon which always moves away from it. The reason behind this shift in people’s mentalities is the broad acknowledgment that poverty is about more than just low incomes. What lies at the heart of how most people understand ‘poverty’ are their observations of instances of lower than reasonably required consumption and inadequate living standards. Aspects of poor health, a shortened lifespan, limited access to education, knowledge and information, and powerlessness in various domains are also associations that this term has conjured up.
Poverty has been a growing problem in America, and it most likely will never stop being one. Someone who is identified as being in poverty lives beneath the poverty line determined by the Federal government. The poverty line in 2015 for a family of four was $24,250. These are the people who are really considered poor. Poverty isn’t just a problem in the United States; in fact, other countries struggle just as much, if not more, than the United States does. Many people struggle to keep themselves above the government’s poverty line, shown by the fact that the percent of poor people in America hasn’t drastically changed over the years. However, it is possible to get out of, and ultimately stay out of, poverty.
As an African American woman, I have lived and worked in underserved communities and have experienced personally, the social and economic injustices grieved by underserved communities and the working poor. All of which, has increased my desires to work with such populations. A reserved person by nature, I have exposed an inner voice that I was oblivious to. I have expressed my inner voice to those living in underserved communities, who are seeking social and economic stability. I have come to classify and value the strength I have developed by the need, to survive in an underserved community. I use these as my continuous struggle against the social and economic injustices that I have experienced, as a product of an underserved community and as an African American woman. I have continued my struggle to overcome the barriers from my upbringing in an underserved community.
Poverty is a global epidemic that contributes to the deaths of millions each year. However, poverty is more prominent in some areas around the world than others. The Oxford dictionary defines poverty as the state or condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of support, but it’s so much more. Poverty can be defined as being hungry, lacking shelter, being unable to go to school, being unable to see a doctor, or being powerless and having a lack of freedom. The reason behind the many descriptions of poverty is that poverty has many faces, and its definition changes depending on the place and time, however the effects of poverty on the poor are always the same.
I will never forget my fifth birthday. It was a time of great sadness. It was in 1932 when thousands had lost their homes because they could not pay their mortgages. That year alone, some 25, 000 families and more than 200,000 young people wandered through the country seeking food, shelter, and clothing. My family was such a family. We were homeless and father was jobless. Father told us that we were traveling from place to place looking for 'the way.' We obtained food from welfare agencies or religious missions in towns along the way. Most of our meals, when we were lucky enough to have one, consisted of soup, beans, or stew and precious little of that. My oldest brother Mikey sometimes would find food in garbage cans from behind places in the towns we traveled through. I was so young then that I never knew where the food came from, and I remember how thankful Father and Mother were that our family had anything at all. I remember that Father always said the same little prayer before we would eat, but there never seemed to be enough to go around.
Poverty is “the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions” (Merriam-Webster dictionary, 2015); in other words, struggling to provide a comfortable living style. It is the cause of family stress and many other problems, especially for the children. Millions of people around the world are struggling with poverty; families suffering to provide enough food seem to be growing in numbers. According to the United States Census Bureau, the poverty rate was highest in the 1960s and decreased greatly in the 1970s. However, it is now slowly starting to increase again. Recently released census data by the Bureau showed that one in five people are living in poverty (Census Bureau, 2014). Poverty is even
As one of the biggest problems facing the world today, poverty continues to have significant negative implications for the society. The effects of poverty are extremely severe and far-reaching, so much so that it was one of the top Millennium Development Goals agreed upon at the Millennium Summit of the UN back in 2000 (Hatcher, 2016). To understand the effects that poverty has on the society, one must critically analyze the societies in which poverty is rampant, as well as analyze poverty from the relative perspectives that it presents. The core aim of this paper is to develop a holistic understanding of poverty and elaborate on the diverse ways in which it continues to affect societies across the world.
In conclusion, sometimes actions take place that changes a person’s outlook on life and as you can see poverty is one that can have a huge effect on not only one person, but also the people around him/ her.