1.“There are children in
the poorest, most abandoned places who, despite the miseries and poisons that
the world has pumped into their lives, seem, when you first meet them, to be
cheerful anyway.”
I think that there are
many reasons why children put on a cheerful disposition, because lots of them
don’t want to show their true feelings of anguish, anxiety, and horror. These
children because of what they face act older than their time and put on an act
to hide their emotions. Maybe keep their younger brothers or sisters happy or
to help ease the pain of what their parents are going through.
2. “Cliff’s mother
speaking” “She tells me that more than
3,000 homeless families have been relocated by the city in this neighborhood
during the past few years, and she asks a question will hear from many other
people here during the months ahead. “Why do you want to put so many people
with small children in a place with so much sickness?”
I think that New York
City puts all people who are poor and sick in the Mott Haven area because they
know that these people can’t afford to get the proper care to get better. So
the city bunches all of these people with the same common diseases together.
The reason city is doing this is to prevent different kinds of diseases from
spreading to other boroughs of the city.
3. “When I ask him who his
heroes are, he first says “Michael Jackson” and then “Oprah!”-like that, with
an exclamation on the word. I try to get him to speak about “important” persons
as the schools tend to define them. “Have you read about George Washington?” “I
don’t even know the man,” he says.
I believe that the reason Cliff has never heard of George
Washington is because in this community the schools are over populated, not
enough teachers, and almost nonexistent educational material because the
schools have little funding. The teachers that they do have probably cannot
teach because of the overly populated classes and lastly the teachers not
believe they will never get anywhere in life, because of the people who surround
them and the poor environment they live in.
