Poverty in my life

The stressors that came along with living in those conditions as a child have made me the person I am today. Psychologically, living in these conditions broke me down as well as other members in my family but we had each other to support ourselves. My family was and is united and this was the main factor that helped me cope with the poverty.  

My parents taught me that an education would provide me with the opportunity to have a job that would pay  a decent amount for me to live in better conditions as I had growing up. I value education as it was the able to prepare me for the job I have now and with the help of my sister, we both succeeds and brought our family out of poverty.

While growing up, my parents were never able to buy me new clothes. We would go to yard sales and second hand stores to shop for clothes. I was always embarrassed to go shopping for clothes. Before I was old enough to understand the meaning of poverty, I would resent my parents. I would think that they did not love me because they would not buy me the toys or name brand tennis shoes that I wanted. How I coped with it. I don’t know that it is because I just learned to make the best out of my situation or it’s just that I was lucky to have fallen in love with a certain style of clothing. I now enjoy going to various second hand stores to look for inexpensive used vintage clothing.  I typically dress in the style of the decades of the forties and fifties and I am no longer embarrassed to say where I shop.

The country in the world that I would like to know more about is the United States. I know many families that are struggling through life and trying to end poverty in lives through education as my family succeeded. The factor that hinders these families is that they are undocumented. Healthcare or any government assistance is either limited or not available to these families. In California, a bill known as AB 540 currently allows undocumented students to attend universities if they have attend at least three years of high school in the this country. This is great as I meet many classmates that were able to gain the knowledge and get educated. My parents as theirs taught them that the way out of poverty was to get an education and be able to succeed in a career where they would be financially stable later in life. The problem with these students is that after they received their degrees, they were yet in the same boat or worst than before. Since they do not have a social security number, they are not able to practice their degrees. They cannot get hired. These students did not receive financial aid for their education. The family must pay for all the expensive and go into an even worst level of poverty as they invested in the youth’s future. What the state of California is doing to minimize the harm is to pass more laws that will allow undocumented students to receive financial aid. California is the first state to enact a bill called the “California Dream Act” which allows undocumented students to receive privately funded scholarships to enroll in the states public colleges. A number of other states have considered implementing this law but as a country, I see that many families are unable to break free from poverty generation after generation.