Forgotten Children in Amazing Grace Amazing Grace by Jonathan Kozol is a book about the trials and tribulations of daily life for a group of children who live in the poorest congressional district in the United States, the South Bronx. Their lives may seem extraordinary to us, but to them, they are just as normal as everyone else. What is normal? For children in the South Bronx, living with pollution, disease, drugs and violence is the only way of life many of them have ever known. In this book, children speak openly and honestly about their feelings of being "abandoned," "hidden," or "forgotten" by our nation, blind to their problems. Studying the people themselves would only help us understand what their community is really like and why they feel that way. Jonathan Kozol really got to know people individually. We can benefit from their knowledge and stories to try to better understand the environment in which they live. In doing so, we can explore the many reasons why people are having problems, what some levels of intervention might be, and potentially find solutions to make the South Bronx a healthier and safer place for these and other children. Identifying Problems The environment in which we study these people can only be defined by first looking at the possible reasons why these people have problems. Some of the issues discussed in Amazing Grace have been spreading across the United States for some time now. The high number of drug addicts in the community, high levels of gang violence, and numerous cases of people contracting the AIDS virus are just some of the problems that have emerged in this ghetto. There are many differences between this community and others in the United States, one of them being that the government has grouped these people together and ghettoized the lowest income families. This ostracized them from the rest of the nation. This caused them many issues of abandonment, while also telling them that they did not deserve to live among the wealthier population. Environmental factors are involved in the problems occurring in the South Bronx. Pollution, for example, could be the main cause of the high number of asthmatic children in the community. Asthma is a condition in which one has difficulty breathing. Without clean air, it is almost impossible for an asthmatic to breathe. A trash burner in the middle of the South Bronx is causing a lot of pollution and making the air people breathe below safe levels of cleanliness. Another environmental factor that affects the health of residents is that most of the buildings in these neighborhoods are dilapidated and infested with rats. Many buildings do not have working elevators. This forces people to climb several flights of stairs every time they want to leave their apartment. This is time-consuming and tedious. Then, when they find out that there is so much violence and drugs on the street that it's not safe to be there anyway, they usually end up staying in their apartment most of their time free. Cultural differences between these people and others from higher-income communities are also a reason they may have problems. Racism is very evident to residents of the South Bronx, especially when they go outside their neighborhood. If a woman from that area goes to a hospital outside her district, a hospital that is probably wealthier and cleaner, she is usually turned away and told to go toa hospital in its own district. Others, admitted to these hospitals, are placed on a special floor, primarily for low-income people or Medicaid patients. (Amazing Grace, p. 176) Another way the government discriminates against them is the way they are housed. Most residents live in government housing where the government pays their rent. When the government helped people get off the streets and out of homeless shelters and then placed them in low-cost housing, they placed all residents in the same neighborhood. This created their ghetto and kept them separated from the rest of the world. If we view these people through an exosystem, or "a setting in which a person does not participate but in which important decisions are made that affect the person or other people who directly interact with the person," we would ask the question “are decisions made? keeping in mind the interests of the individual and the family? » (Social Work and Welfare, p. 79) Did the government really have the people of the South Bronx in mind when it lumped all the sick, struggling, and low-income families into the same community? What kind of opportunity structure can people have when the government puts them in endless situations, like giving them just enough money to survive, but not enough to get out of poverty? Some say it's not the government's responsibility to lift people out of poverty, but then whose fault is it that they did it in the first place? Nobody asks to be poor, nobody asks to be homeless. Cultural differences are an excuse used by some to treat people of different origins differently. But can the government also participate in this obvious form of racism? Our nation has worked to end racism and prejudice for many years, but the problem remains widespread in communities around the world. We might also examine people and their problems using a macrosystem, or "models, to define and organize the institutional life of society" (Social Work and Welfare, p. 79) to decide whether certain groups are valued. at the expense of others and do these groups experience oppression? As we have seen, residents of the South Bronx feel abandoned, it is a form of oppression. They are alienated from the rest of society, where the only place they can turn is to this community filled with crime, violence, disease and poverty. Residents shared their assumptions about what the government wants and expects from them. The government's attitude towards these people is such that residents feel devalued and unworthy of being seen or heard. Without much hope of financial stability, many turned to selling and/or using drugs. Selling drugs is considered an easy way to make money, and drug use keeps a person in great shape so that they don't have to face reality. This only perpetuates the cycle of problems they face, because selling drugs to others keeps those others in a state of euphoria, and remaining in a drug-induced state of euphoria only prolongs the problems. Discussion and Recommendations Because of all the trials and tribulations they go through, you would think that everyone in this community would lose hope. That's not the case for most of the kids Jonathan Kozol spoke to and befriended during his many trips to their neighborhood. The children talk about their problems with great maturity. Many of these children are much older than their"..