Getting to Know Your International Contacts

In the beginning I thought I was going to have success contacting someone from around the world. As this process has continued, my success has seemed less likely. I do hope that I will have better success further in the semester so that I can communicate with a colleague from around the world. As a result of the lack of success I was having, I chose to listen to a podcast instead in order to complete this project. 

The podcast I chose to listen to is called “The Poorest Children in America”. Here is a link to the podcast: http://onpoint.wbur.org/2012/09/17/poorest-children. The podcast is by Jonathan Kozol and it tracks the lives of the poorest children in America, and where they go. It is from September 17, 2012, so it is also fairly current. 

This podcast was very interesting to me. I very much appreciated the fact that this man has literally followed and tracked the lives of the poorest children in America since the 1980’s. He talks about the children’s experiences and how the young children tried to support their families. He also talks about homeless families and how they were moved from a shelter to the poorest neighborhood in the South Bronx. Hearing him talk about the poor living conditions as well as the personal connection that he made with these families was incredible to me. The maltreatment of these families was something I had never heard of before. The lasting emotional damage that some of the families and children incurred was detrimental to some of the people involved. It was so sad to me to hear a mother discussing her experience as a parent in this situation. She felt so genuinely bad about not being able to help her child. She wanted better for her son, but her son unfortunately was a victim of circumstance. Another topic of this discuss was children who possibly had PTSD as a result of living in poverty and being moved from the poor conditions in the shelter to the South Bronx. The last thing that they discussed was what happens to these children once they are involved in the school system. It can be quite a struggle for these children for a few reasons. There is no perfect way for a school system to work, but unfortunately children growing up in poverty go from struggling at home to struggling at school. 

I think I gained a lot of new insights regarding poverty. One of the biggest things was just how different the true story is rather than the statistics. I have some experience working with children living in poverty, but this gave me a broader perspective on the matter. I think there is a misconception about what life is like for children growing up in poverty. We do not always hear the whole story. It is difficult to fully grasp the struggles and problems for these children and families and how to help them if we do not fully understand what they are experiencing.