Question

make a diary entry regarding your feelings for under privileged children

Answer 1

Hey friend :-)

Here is your Diary Entry

I would write the day and time here, if I had something to tell me the time. The sun is about to set though, so I can say it is evening.

Rainwater falls through the crack on the tin roof, creating a steady rhythm in our cramped room, home to our family of eight. My parents and my five siblings. My two younger siblings died due to sickness, they did not survive past the age of four. Sometimes I thank God, that they died early so they never had to endure further suffering due to hunger.

Hunger.

It’s all I’ve ever known. I’m eleven years old now and in the eleven years of my existence, I have never known what being well-fed is like. I do not know what surplus means, the only thing I’ve ever known is shortage.

Shortage of food.

Shortage of clean water.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night so hungry that I want to scream out loud, “Why! Why must I suffer so much?”

However, I don’t scream.

I think of the other seven people trying to sleep in the room.

At some point however, hot tears start rolling down my cheeks and I can’t stop the sobs that overcome me. The saddest thing is that sorrow is infectious. Soon, I can hear my siblings crying too. I should be taking care of them but I’m just so hungry, it’s all I can think about

Gradually, you learn ways to deal with it. I’ve learnt that if you drink enough water, hunger dies. Or when your head starts spinning from daily labour and lack of food, you should close your eyes shut really tight and for a few seconds dream of delicious food – the kind I see every day when I walk past the bakery shop.

I don’t know how any of the food tastes, but it looks beautiful so I imagine how it would taste like.

So what does a daily wage labourer’s eleven year old son do?

He stands at traffic signals, begging people to buy window shields.

I’m the child you send away when I stand at your window. The child you scream at, when I accidentally touch your car with my ‘dirty’ hands – even my existence appalls you.

Days go by under the blazing sun, as I try to earn a livelihood for my family. Sometimes when the sun’s intensity gets to me, I faint due to the heat and occasionally, a kind stranger sprinkles water on my face; offers water and leaves a coin in my hand.

However sometimes I lie on the pavement till I return to my senses, as seas of people pass by, rushing ahead.

Maybe that’s my threshold of suffering. A threshold I test routinely.

We fall under the poverty line – the people who do not make enough to buy basic necessities. It is not just a poverty line. It is the starvation line; the line below which lie ill, screaming children, struck with hopelessness.

Sometimes in the mornings when I go to sell windows shields, I see children in crisp white uniforms seated against the windows of their school buses. I imagine what it would be like if I were also on that bus, in my crisp white uniform, with a cartoon bag pack. Once in a while, some child opens his snack box, I can’t help but stare into the scrumptious-looking food.

But then, the traffic signal turns green and I watch a better life fade away into the blur of grey smoke.

I used to wear a pair of rubber sandals everyday, but they are now a shredded mess of rubber. So now, I walk barefoot on the streets.

On hot days, it feels like walking on molten coal and on rainy days I slip and slide through the mud and grime. I wish the grumbling sounds in my stomach would extinguish, so that I could work harder. However, it haunts me everywhere I go.

They say hope and imagination is the death of the poor. That we are destined to live and die in the gutter we were born. However, hope is all I have.

Hope that one day, life will change. That one day my baby brothers and sisters will not go to bed crying of hunger, that I will earn enough money for my family to be able to leave that cramped room which reeks of stale air and lost dreams.

The thing is we don’t have anything left to lose. You can’t fall any lower.

Hope is all that’s left.

Hoping it helps

Thanks :D