by Meagan Spain

Created on: November 19, 2008   Last Updated: November 29, 2008

At seven years old I found myself digging through trash cans to find food to feed my little brother and myself. Our mother would disappear for days at a time with men, alcohol, and drugs. Eventually we found ourselves living in an alley, making do with card board boxes and the miscellaneous stuff that people throw away.

A year or so later I found myself living in the suburbs of Chicago with my father and stepmother. They had beautiful furniture, clothes that I had only imagined, food galore, and things that I had never imagined would be in a house that I was living in. When I was in fifth grade (in 1991) we moved to Tennessee and bought a farm 35 minutes from any town. The next farm down from ours had a three room house in which 8 people lived. Their bathroom was in the dairy barn and the house did not have running water. Further down, at the end of our gravel road was a house that I always thought was abandoned, just to find out that 5 people lived in it without water or electricity.

I became even more amazed when I was in high school and learned that there are many people that still live that way. There are little communities that are comprised of all the members of several families that never leave. One particular family owns all of the houses in a community and every member of the family still lives there, going all the way back to the great-grandparents of the children that I went to school with. Most of the houses do not have running water in the house, some lacked electricity, none of the homes had telephones, and most of the adults did not own a vehicle of any sort.

After high school, I went on to college to get my undergraduate degrees. Sure, times were tough but by no means did I live under the circumstances that these families did. Then I graduated in May and moved to Kentucky a month later. A year after I graduated, I was struggling, living pay check to pay check, and I then I had my first child. For the first 8 weeks of her life, we slept in my truck. I didn't have the money to get us through. I did what I had to do. By the time that she was six months old, I had a roof over our head but I did not have a telephone, didn't know how I was going to pay the rent, would only eat when I was at work, and life sucked. I moved us to a different house with cheaper rent and ended up living with rats, mice, and roaches for the next 5 months. Someone with two college degrees isn't supposed to live like this but no one ever told me or taught me how to survive in

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>