One of the stressors that I can relate to is that of poverty. Living in the Caribbean for most of my life has helped me to understand that we were poor. As a child, my parents struggled to raise six children-four boys and two girls. (I am the eldest of the six children). My father was the sole bread winner. But, although my mother stayed at home, she was the stabilizing matriarch who kept the family together. Her diligence, resilience, faith in God and her hope became the bulwark that stave off starvation from us because my father became an addict to gambling. He dreamed of beating poverty through winning large sums of money from horse racing. So while my father worked long hours (sometimes as long as eighteen hours doing overtime) to make sufficient money for maintaining the family and his gambling habits, my mother would also work in the home –creating a balance by keeping the home healthy, saving what she could to ensure that our school fees were paid and that we were fed.
Looking back on my childhood days, I realized that our main support or resource that kept us was faith in God’s words. We were constantly taught everyday to believe and pray that God would see us through. As a little girl from as early as eight years old, I understood that God was my Heavenly Father, and anything I needed I could ask Him for and I would get it. My mother also taught us to be industrious and diligent in our school work (she helped me up to the third grade in high school) because she inculcated in us that education was the only way out of poverty. I believed in her words and in her faith. I was securely and emotionally attached to her. At this point I must say that I loved my father too, but I could not believe his words when he said that he was buying these horses every week and I could not see them coming home. In my concrete operational mind/stage of development, I remembered telling my father that it did not make sense for him to be buying horses that he could not take home. I remembered his laughter at my silliness but in my childlike innocent heart, I knew at the time I was right.
Dreaming and hoping too were important mechanisms that kept us going strong during the 1960’s; & 1970’s as children. We were avid consumers of the Hardy Boys’, Nancy Drew’s series as well as Enid Blython books. We hoped and dreamed that we would have some type of adventure someday like those story book children who seemed to have had a wonderful, beautiful life.
Growing up in poverty was not easy as a child. You knew you were deprived of many things-lots of clothes, shoes, plenty of toys and even food sometimes. But we learned to celebrate our one-pot meals of (for example) stewed red peas and rice, or cornmeal porridge with bread and sardines. We also learned to celebrate the coming of our grandparents and uncles and aunts who would on many occasions bring along a box of yams, sugar cane, mangoes, and ackee and bread fruit from the country to help us. These celebrated occasions have now turned into sacred moments of thankfulness as I continue to journey into mature adulthood. This is so because we knew that nothing could keep us back as children from achieving our goals except ourselves. It would have to be poverty of the mind and soul and not poverty because we were deprived of external things.
The region or country that I am interested in is situated in Asia and I have always been interested in the work of “Asian Aid USA” in India. (They also work in Nepal and Bangladesh). For over forty years Asian Aid has been working tirelessly to give hope and a future to the “disadvantaged, poor, and needy in India, Nepal and Bangladesh.” In these regions the stressors that impact the development of children are similar. They include poverty, the death of parents (especially mothers) which leave children as orphans, abandonment; diseases such as leprosy, blindness, deafness, abuse are among some of the stressors that affect the children of Asia.
“Asian Aid USA” is a nonprofit organization that is committed to making a difference in the lives of children and people in poverty in India,Bangladesh and Nepal. This ministry is one of the many means that through which a great deal is being done to minimize some of the stressors affecting the development of children. They serve by providing education to the needy, orphans, the blind and deaf, feeding the hungry, protecting girls from human trafficking and improving lives through village development and also by offering vocational training to children and young adults through sponsorship programs.
