Poverty
It was the summer of year 1968 and my family and I were in route from Long Island New York to New York City. Our destination was 125th Street in Harlem. This was my first time actually going into Harlem although I had heard so much about it. As we crossed the Tri-borough Bridge I can remember coming down 125th Street and seeing people sleeping on the sidewalk and looking for food in trash cans. As a child this was overwhelming especially since I lived in a nice neighborhood on Long Island. I asked my mom about the people and she explained to me that these were homeless people who had nowhere to live. I never thought about people living in New York and not having anywhere to stay. As a child I always heard about people and children in Africa not having food to eat or places to stay.As years passed and I continued to travel to New York I learned that poverty was very much alive in New York City. Instead of poverty getting better it became worse. We often hear about poverty in other countries poverty is here in the United States and it hits close to home. For the past 30 years I have sacrificed my time every 4th Wednesday Night of the month to feed the homeless in my home time. I feel it is the least that I can do for my community. It could be me one check away from being in the homeless shelter.
Basic Facts About Homelessness
• Each night more than 45,000 people -- including 17,000 children -- experience homelessness.
• Currently 41,200 homeless men, women, and children bed down each night in municipal homeless shelters, and thousands more sleep rough on the streets or in other forms of shelter.
• Each year, more than 110,000 different homeless New Yorkers, including more than 40,000 children, sleep in the municipal shelter system.
• The number of homeless families has nearly doubled over the past decade.
I too remember the first time that I encountered homelessness. I was afraid of these people who looked and acted so differently from those that I knew. You're right that we hear so much about children from other nations who are starving or living in extreme poverty - why don't we hear more about those in our own country and communities?
ReplyDeleteLast year, we had a 3 year old in our program who was taken in by his grandmother because his mother was living on the streets. Unfortunately, the grandmother, too, was unemployed and we ended up losing the child because she had to move out of her home and could no longer afford to keep him in school.