nbc news Olivia knows there won’t be enough food. She spoons white rice onto her family’s plates, leaving hers empty, and tops them with beef guisado
stew, steeped in the flavors of peppers, tomatoes and a blend of Goya spices from the cabinet. Her three children sit eagerly at the dinner table. She hands them their plates, grabs a banana for herself, and joins them. She can see the Empire State building from the window. That night, she’ll wake up with hunger pains and go to the kitchen to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich before heading back to sleep. “There was one year of my life,” Olivia tells me, “when I had breakfast, lunch, and dinner from home. I was 5 years old.” The rest of her childhood meals came from school lunches, her friends’ plates in the cafeteria, or dinners at their homes.
Related: These Trader Joe’s Thanksgiving Hacks Will Change Your Life
Olivia is one of the 13.5 million young adults living in poverty in the United States. That’s one in five 18-to-34-year-olds. She feeds her four-person family with $500 in food stamps each month — roughly $1.40 per meal per person — provided by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (
SNAP). The SNAP funds are meant to supplement additional income, but in Olivia’s case, it’s nearly all the money she has to rely on, leaving her and her family food insecure. In 2014,
an estimated 14% of American households were food insecure
, meaning they “lacked access to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members,“ according to USDA research.
Yet in many ways, Olivia is a shining example of this program: She uses the government support to help her pursue a degree in psychology (she will be the first woman in her family to graduate from college). She’s an active member of her school; other students approach her in the halls to ask about the next meeting of her club that focuses on youth justice. On days off from school, she’s an intern with a nonprofit that helps ex-convicts apply for and succeed in college. Government programs and some money from her boyfriend cover the rent.
Born to a single mother who had emigrated from Ecuador, Olivia grew up largely on her own in NYC and found herself in the throes of an abusive, unstable home life. At 17, she decided that she wanted to fix her family by starting one of her own. “I wanted to be pregnant,” she confesses. “This was going to be my way out.” A decade later, she lives in a two-bedroom apartment with her three kids: Jesse, age 10, Corey, age 9, and Annie, age 5. She has been a single parent since just after Corey was born, but gets support today from her boyfriend, Annie’s father. School certificates that boast good behavior and high test scores are arranged between family photos on the walls of her home.
0 comments:
Post a Comment