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Make Lemonade Essay In the Fox Valley there has been a growing in a homeless population which is not good. This is happening more and more because how expensive everything is getting. In the story, Make Lemonade, Jolly tells her story about she was homeless for a while and about her teen pregnancy. She had to drop out of school to try to provide for her and her two little ones. During the course of the story Jolly and her family's lifestyle develops because LaVaughn and others were getting more involved in her life to try to get her back on her feet. When Jolly had no help in life she was just trying to survive. My first quote is about when Jolly dropped out of high school and lived in a fridge box for a couple of years. “Right
Jolly flourishes from the person who she was at the start of the book to the person she is now. Before, Jolly did not have her life in order and she couldn’t raise her family with her low-income. In page 7 of the novel, Jolly repetitively states,“I can’t do it all alone”, because she had nobody that supported her or at least gave her advice on parenting, life, etc. Jolly left school three years ago because she was pregnant with Jeremy. According to LaVaughn, she can barely spell and she depends on everyone to help her. For example, when she was filling out the Department of Human Resources application, Jolly states, “Nobody ever tells me. Do you know there ain’t a single person in the whole world I can count on?” (Pg 113). Her apartment is very disorderly and smells and she does not receive any medical benefits. However, things get worse for Jolly when she loses her job at a factory after she got sexually harassed by her bos...
In the novel The Bread Givers, there was a Jewish family, the Smolinsky family, that had immigrated from Russia to America. The family consisted of four daughters, a father, and a mother. The family lived in a poverty-stricken ghetto. The youngest of the daughters was Sara Smolinsky, nicknamed ?Iron Head? for her stubbornness. She was the only daughter that was brave enough to leave home and go out on her own and pursue something she wanted without the permission of her father. The Smolinsky family was very poor, they were to the point of which they could not afford to throw away potato peelings, and to the point of which they had to dig through other people?s thrown out ash in order to gather the coal they needed. They could not afford to buy themselves new clothes or new furniture.
She knows she will never truly experience poverty because this is nothing more than a project but she leaves behind her old life and becomes known as a divorced homemaker reentering the workforce after many years. Her main goal is to get enough income to be able to pay for all her expenses and have enough money to pay next months rent.
A suburban life is a paradise full of shopping, colorful gardens, and well-groomed homes. Despite all these benefits, a suburban life is an isolated life. People living in suburbs are rarely exposed to miseries in society. One of these conflicts is homelessness. When living in an environment surrounded by homes, individuals often have difficulty imagining not being able to sleep in a warm bed, eat a proper meal or even receive necessary medical attention. This grim situation is depicted in the writings of Jeannette Walls. In the autobiography The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls accurately portrays homelessness by explaining its causes, its impact upon daily life, and its effect on victimized families.
When people see the homeless, they are quick to assume whether the homeless are where they’re at because of drugs, or not being in a stable environment. However, homeless people rarely receive an opportunity to tell their life stories or even have the chance to explain how they ended up in the situations they are in. Homelessness in Boston has persisted and increased for decades. Though there have been efforts to combating the issues of homelessness and housing, it appears that there is no solution in sight. Winter have become nightmares for most of the homeless population in Boston. Weather ranges from thirty degrees down to ten, sometimes single numbers. Weather that is below freezing are moments where people like myself, need to be in warm places. Kourtney McLean is a woman financially and emotionally not stable enough to take care of herself. Ms. McLean has been living on the streets for almost all her life --homeless and struggling to get on her
The thought of her brothers still being in her former home environment in Maine hurt her. She tried to think of a way to get at least one of her brothers, the sickly one, to come and be with her. She knew that her extended family was financially able to take in another child, and if she showed responsibility, there would be no problem (Wilson, 40). She found a vacant store, furnished it, and turned it into a school for children (Thinkquest, 5). At the age of seventeen, her grandmother sent her a correspondence, and requested her to come back to Boston with her brother (Thinkquest, 6).
When things became difficult in her life, Jeannette always persevered and tried to stay positive. For instance, when Jeannette, Lori and Brian had been saving up money for almost nine months, they came home one day to a broken piggy bank and all of their money, gone. They knew that their father had to have done it, and they couldn’t believe he did. Although “Lori felt too defeated,” Jeannette “started saving again.” She got past what her father had done, and only looked forward. She worked even harder, babysitting whenever she could. Jeannette had such a positive outlook on life and was determined to make up for what had happened. She persevered and worked as hard as she could to make New York a possibility. Her dedication in spite of the obstacles shows true character. Jeannette, not only persevered, but also had to make do with what she was given. Since her family didn’t have a constant source of money, Jeannette learned to use her resources wisely. She knew she had crooked teeth, so she wanted to get braces. She believed she had enough money to pay for them herself, but when she was informed that they cost twelve hundred dollars, she “decided to make her own braces.” She used a coat hanger and rubber bands, and surprisingly, it worked. Jeannette went to the trouble of building her own contraption to fix her teeth, just so she wouldn’t be a burden to her family. She showed
Beginning with Mrs. Hopewell, the title of the story comes from what she likes to call the poorer and less fortunate people that live off the land and work their whole lives just to hang on to some scrap of a life. This is how she views these people. She believes that they are good country people not a bad seed among them, that they are all eager to help out and bow in humility to the upper class. The gullible nature of Mrs. Hopewell betrays her true vision of a situation. She is one of those people who are all goody-goody to people who they view as less fortunate. She’s a person that commends or speaks for the people she knows nothing about. Altogether this is her true weakness that is taken advantage of by Manley Pointer. One of ...
The Simple Gift by Steven Herrick explores the causes and challenges of homelessness in today's youth. It highlights the struggles that a victim of homelessness would go through, such as finding a place to sleep every night, and finding a source of food and money. The Simple Gift also showed some causes of homelessness, which were demonstrated in the book through out the story.
The Bragg family grew up with virtually nothing. The father left the family a number of times, offering no financial assistance and stealing whatever he could before he left. When he was there, he was usually drunk and physically abusive to the mother. He rarely went after the children, but when he did the mother was always there to offer protection. Mr. Bragg's mother's life consisted of working herself to exhaustion and using whatever money she had on the children.
With a large family such as the Stanleys, financially supporting everyone in the family is difficult with a stable economy, let alone during a period of struggle (Frontline Video, 2013). During this time, the middle class was in poverty, meaning people in poverty originally, are far financially worse (Frontline Video, 2013). The father, Claude, was a pastor (Frontline Video, 2013). The mother, Jacki, made efforts to find work (Frontline Video, 2013). She spent most of her time helping her husband run the church (Frontline Video, 2013).
Starting off the discussion we will start with chapter one. Chapter one is about Decent and street families. Decent families are families who live by society’s norms and try to avoid violence, drugs, confrontation, whereas street families embrace violence and fear because it is a way to stay alive within their neighborhoods. In the chapter they discuss how many families in the inner city actually have the decent family values, but can also harbor the street values. For example in the chapter they actually discussed an instance where Marge a women they had interviewed had a problem with others in her neighborhood. Her story s...
The story is told through the eyes of seven year old Luke Chandler. Luke lives with his parents and grandparents on their rented farmland in the lowlands of Arkansas. It takes place during the harvest season for cotton in 1952. Like other cotton growers, these were hard times for the Chandlers. Their simple lives reached their zenith each year with the task of picking cotton. It’s more than any family can complete by themselves. In order to harvest the crops and get paid, the Chandlers must find cotton pickers to help get the crops to the cotton gin. In order to persevere, they must depend on others. They find two sets of migrant farm workers to assist them with their efforts: the Mexicans, and the Spruills - a family from the Arkansas hills that pick cotton for others each year. In reading the book, the reader learns quickly that l...
To begin with, Miss Moore, Sylvia, and the other children are from the “slums”. However, what differentiate Miss Moore and everyone else in the neighborhood is that she has a college education, and speaks Standard English. As a result, Miss Moore plays the role as teacher to the neighborhood children. Most of the children from the neighborhood were poverty stricken and had a ghetto vernacular. Especially, Sylvia, who mouth is atrocious and has a strong animosity towards Miss Moore. For instance,“Miss Moore was her name. The only woman on the block with no first name. And she was black as hell, cept for her feet, which were fish-white and spooky.” Moreover, Miss Moore has high expectations of the children, so she takes them on a trip outside the hood to unveil the real world. Before going on the trip to the toy store Miss Moore tried to explain the value of money to the children. For example, “So we heading down the street and she’s boring us silly about what things cost and what our parents make and how much goes for rent and how money ain’t divided up right in this country.” At first, Sylvia is t...
The Alcott family was always struggling to survive, and often was forced to move from place to place in order to find work. Bronson Alcott was an extremely educated man, but because he had a hard time of supporting his family they were “Impoverished and often moved like vagabonds to smaller and smaller quarters” (Butos). Bronson was a schoolteacher who believed in teaching his students more than just simple memorization. For this reason, he was usually out of work, leaving his growing family with no income. However, the children never really understood just how poor they were until later on in their lives. Alcott’s family was so poor that her mother’s family, a prominent Boston family, urged her mother to disclaim her husband. As soon as she was able to realize how poor they were, she vowed that she would gratify her family by pulling them out of poverty. Alcott lived in an extremely poor family growing up, but she still had a good childh...