blog 8

Urban poverty creates more depressing outcomes for children and their family living there. Urban poverty leads to joblessness that leads in particulary single mothers that will have to deal with all the obstacles of not having a desecent support partner and being in an environment that does not help them toward achieving any ideals. Urban poverty leads to a lesser quality of life and in some way no hope to make it better. It is not the fact that they (mothers,fathers) are not working had enough to provide good health care,education, etc to their children it is just they environment that does not help out either. Job flexibility is also a huge issue. A balance is somewhat drawn upon families. Father or mothers are ask to choose their job or going to pick up their sick children from school. If there sick (parents or children) they have to pay out of their pockets and lose days of work. There is really no security or ways of advancing towards a better future.

This issue hits home a bit more. I was raised in the bay area. In particulary Oakland,California. My parents were making good enough money to give me all that I needed. However the environment was not a very suitable place to grow up. I was fortunate I had the resources to actually go to schools that were a bit more competing than the ones in my neighboorhod. However I saw many of my friends from my neighboorhod struggle with everyday things. It was hard for me to see that. I sort of saw this when I could not go outside and play because I didn’t know if I could get shot by gangsters, I saw the drug use, prostitution and kids getting jumped close by home as well as being. My mother worried a lot. Although my father was making enough money for us to live with everything we needed, he still worried for our safety and it did become an issue at some point. I can really relate to the urban poverty. I really don’t think I had a childhood where I could go outside and play in order for my siblings to feel like we were somewhere pleasant to play my parents took my siblings and I out to San Francisco pier or to close by towns where it was “safer” to play with my siblings. One of the reasons we moved to Arizona was precisely the issue of safety and education. Transportation does get costly in the Bay Area as well as everything else. In order to go to good and safe schools I had to travel and I got home late. This was a bit nerve wrecking for my mother. Being a women and walking by myself it was just not something my mother wanted to deal with. My mother wanted the for us (all her kids) to get the best of my education as well of my other siblings which is why we moved. It was hard adapting but I know it was for the best. When I moved to Arizona on that week I found out that more than 85 teens from my neighborhood got killed due to being mistaken by other gang members or because they were selling drugs. Not to long ago this past Wednesday I just heard one of my friends from middle school got killed.Stories like these can go on. It is not that these people are bad. It is simple the environment that they live in. I tend to stop and think every time I hear someone that was once so close to me dies or gets killed. I can not imagine the future generations that are now growing up in urban poverty It seems as an issue of inequality and injustice that as a society we allow this to happen. That many children are living in poverty and we turn our heads away from them and from the lack of help these young individuals need as well as the support their parents need.

It is unjust to not offer any help. I think I have experienced wealth as well as poverty. My parents tried everything to keep me away from the suffering of poverty even though they had to live through it. My father an immigrant farm worker and later shifted to so many job positions juggling family and trying to learn a new language to bring more food to the table. My mother a hard working a woman that has battled to give her children a genuine encouragement to have aspirations and goals in life. As an adult however I have experienced in some way poverty. Trying to juggle school, and intern, and a part time job, and being a mother and wife. The only thing that keeps me going is that my child will not hopefully live through this poverty that I might be going through instead be in mixed income neighborhood due to my near graduation and hopefully more stable and dependable job.
Although I don’t worry as much any more this class has made me realize my moral obligation to change the way some are living. Especially those that are still living in urban poverty. My personal situation plays an exceptional role in my motivation to not just help myself get out of this cycle but I am now thinking of doing something with other women I personally know in order to break this sort of glass ceiling called urban poverty by setting up a day to help each other with basic needs or give each other information realted to family,education,job opportunities, and nutritional help, it is still in the making but hopefully it will hopefully prosper into something beneficial to some.