READING, SURVIVAL, AND SUCCESS

Running head: READING, SURVIVAL, AND SUCCESS

Reading, Survival, and Success: How Do Stable Support Systems Affect the Survival of
Children Living in the Streets and the Success These Children Have in Their Struggle with
Poverty?

Pauline Mwangi
Principia College

May 8, 2013
WRIT 120
Professor Brian Johnson

READING, SURVIVAL, AND SUCCESS

Dedication

I dedicate this paper to my parents who have helped me understand how to deal with
challenges in life and go to collegea goal that I thought was impossible to reach at first. I
want to thank them for the support and love they have given me.

READING, SURVIVAL, AND SUCCESS

I and my children are now free.

Harriet Jacob

READING, SURVIVAL, AND SUCCESS

Reading, Survival, and Success: How Do Stable Support Systems Affect the Survival of
Children Living in the Streets and the Success These Children Have in Their Struggle with
Poverty?
My definition of survival is persevering through negative things in life without changing
the situations that cause them. For example, when faced with financial troubles a businessman
who chooses not to improve his practice slows his business down by cutting costs and
discontinuing contracts. There is no longer a goal to the business. The business is simply
surviving the financial challenges it faces. My definition of success is different. For me, success
is the achievement of a goal which may include the attainment of wealth or high position. A well
done dance performance, for example, involves the dancers achieving choreography at a level
that pleases a wide audience. Passing a difficult examination to achieve public recognition of
knowledge is another example of success. This paper focuses on the survival and success of
adolescent children who struggle with poverty. Adolescence is a point between childhood and
adulthood where people are maturing physically and becoming mentally able to assume an
identity distinct from others and make own decisions. For privileged children, this process is
supported physically, socially, and economically by a family. For disadvantaged children, this
family support is not always present.
Reading words and the world is a skill crucial for adolescents in search of identity,
especially adolescents who do not have family or friends to read the world with them. Reading
is a process of taking in signs and understanding them in systematic ways. Reading can be seen
as taking in words from printed text, pronouncing the words, and then understanding their
meaning within a sentence. For example, young children are taught how to take in letters so that
they can not only pronounce them but also understand how the letters are used to create full
words and sentences that make sense. Similarly, people read signs that are not in print. Sailors

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and aircraft pilots read wind direction. Parents read the emotional needs of their children. Friends
read one anothers facial expressions to know if they are understood. People read all kinds of
signs to understand others, be resourceful and be useful. Reading helps us to speak, think and
interact with others. I believe people read for survival and success. For example, people study
French to have a second or third language and also because French is internationally spoken.
Some people also read French to be able to understand how things work in another culture and to
be educated about others. Still others learn French with no goal in mind other than to survive
from day to day by locating food, restrooms, and lodging in French cities.
Some people believe that reading has little to do with success and survival. These people
may say that reading is simply limited to books. However, I believe that we read all kinds of
signs in the world, and we use what we understand from these signs to achieve goals or simply
exist from day to day. Reading for survival and success requires us to take in the signs we see
and understand them in systematic ways.
In order to research the link between reading, success and survival, I developed the
following research question: How do stable support systems affect the survival of children living
in the streets and the success these children have in their struggle with poverty? My claim is that
children living in the streets provide each other with stable support through love, companionship
and friendship. Many have structures outside of their families that help with saving money,
forming social groups, and earning money to achieve success. This claim about the survival and
success of impoverished adolescents is supported by analysis of my own life story, my
observations of developing adolescent readers, and my ethnographic reading about the street
children of Dhaka, Bangladesh, a slave girl called Harriet, and other social science research.

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This evidence shows that reading can provide adolescents with stable support systems that go
hand in hand with survival and success in both privileged and disadvantaged contexts.
Methodology
First Sample of Studies: Personal Experience
The research that I applied to inform my thesis included my own personal experience
during my high school years. During my final year of high school, my classmates and I were
under pressure because the last examination we would sit for would determine if we would go to
college. The whole year was a tough journey because we were required to wake up very early to
study, and we went to sleep late after having group discussions to prepare for the exam. I
remember the nights my roommates and I would stay up the whole night reading and studying
together, as well as the shock of not achieving the grade on the exam I needed to go to college.
I wrote about my personal experience by first recalling how the incident of studying for
college entrance exams was an example of survival and success in my life. After deciding what I
was going to write about, I discussed my story with my classmates and professor in my Reading
Words and the World social science class. These discussions helped my focus my story on the
formal definitions of survival, success, reading and adolescent that I presented at the beginning
of this paper. With these definitions in mind, I wrote drafts of my story that were reviewed by
my classmates and my professor. I revised these drafts into a personal essay using specific
guidelines my professor gave to me and my classmates. This writing helped me develop my
initial story.
Once my personal story of survival and success was written, I revised it again to connect
events in my life to my claim that impoverished adolescents can provide one another with means
of saving money, forming social groups, and earning money. My story of scoring poorly on a

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college entrance exam was certainly not the same as those of adolescents struggling with
poverty, but I found some important connections. First, I had to deal with disappointment.
Second, I had to rely on others to overcome my disappointment. Finally, I had to continually
look for new opportunities in order to achieve my goal of going to college, a goal that would
improve my life.
Second Sample of Studies: Ethnographies
I studied two ethnographies in my class, Livelihoods at the Margins (Staples, 2010) and
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In Incidents in the Life a Slave Girl (Jacobs, 1897). Jacobs
(1897) looks at how an African American girl reads her world not only to survive slavery but to
escape from her oppressors. The slave girl made attempts to escape that were designed to
preserve her life and the lives of her children. In her first attempt, Harriet had a disagreement
with her grandmother, with whom she lived and ran away to the house of a friend of her mothers.
She eventually returned to her grandmothers house. One failed escape attempt simply led to
another. Eventually, she was able to run away and work in the plantation of Mrs. Bruce who was
sympathetic enough to employ her without references. One can argue that she was not successful
because she failed to escape many times. However, I feel that failure was not part of her life
because she was determined to be free and eventually achieved it.
Livelihoods at the Margins (Staples, 2010) looks at the lives of youth living in
marginalized conditions in different parts of the world. It discusses the life of people living in
poverty. For example, we see the Bayaye, who are the youth in Kampala, Uganda, do not have
qualifications to acquire good jobs or the support systems to live outside poverty. (Frankland,
2002). Within this book, I chose to study the ethnography about children living in the streets of

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Dhaka, Bangladesh, and their coping strategies (Conticini, 2005). Relating to my research
question, street children in Dhaka read for success by interpreting and manipulating their existing
social structures to improve their lives by saving money and by creating connections that provide
security and companionship. Love and friendship are what make them feel happy and content.
Food is the most important thing to them and most of their income is spent on food. Most of the
street children of Dhaka are not educated and this makes me realize the connection between
poverty and low education.
I researched for additional ethnographies that will support my research question. These
are Conflict in the neighborhood: Street and working children in the public space and Adolescent
Career Development in Urban-Residing Aboriginal Families in Canada. I worked with the
librarian Chelsea Van Riper in Marshall Brooks Library for books related to children living in
poverty and how they live to survive. We discussed on selecting researchable topics that are
manageable, available, and thoughtful and do not involve emotions. She recommended that I
should first browse the library resources to see if any information exists on the topic I choose.
Second she showed us how to use I-Share electronic catalog. Using the search statements such as
truncations, phrase searching, the Boolean AND, the Boolean OR and the Boolean NOT. It
helped me be more specific and find manageable and few resources more easily.
I read my class ethnographies as well as the ethnographies I found in the library using Zpreview methods. Z-Preview occurs by first evaluating the title of a book chapter or article, then
reading the first paragraph, then reading the last paragraph. The Z-Preview concludes by reading
the first sentence of every paragraph. After completing my Z-Preview, I used information from
the preview to generate questions about what I read. Then I used these questions as a guide to
read, looking for answers to the questions I created. After I found the answers in my reading, I

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to my reading notes to recite the answers to my questions, relating to what I read to my thesis
about impoverished adolescents reading to survive and succeed. I answered the questions in
writing using and using the MEAL method. This includes: the main idea, examples, alternative
ideas and links to create six to eight sentence answers to each question I asked. I worked with my
class professor Brian Johnson and the class assistant Wendy Atieno to come up with good
reading notes. I reviewed these notes in order to analyze my ethnographic reading for this paper.
Third Sample of Studies: Developing Adolescent Readers
For this section of the research, the class worked with two pre-teens, whom, for purposes
of confidentiality, we shall call Ortiz and Justin. Ortiz is eleven years old. Both his parents are
teachers one at the college-level and the other in high school. Ortiz is the younger of two
children. Majority of his friends are from the baseball team and the schools band. He was
brought in a religious environment, with his family attending church regularly, even though both
his parents belong to two different churches. Ortiz is exposed to magazines, the internet,
newspapers and printed mass media.
Justin is a very talented athlete. His father works at the local college. He has older
siblings who are working and others in high school. He is currently enrolled in middle school.
His peers are involved in sports. He has grown up surrounded by the religion of Christian
Science. He is also exposed to social media such magazines, newspapers and the internet.
During our weekly sessions with the two adolescents, I observed how they interact with
each other and with other people. Ortiz is very talkative. He likes to be in charge and make his
own decisions. While Justine is very playful and more involved in having a conversation with
new people. While I was watching them play, they seem to play much better when they team up

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with one of the players. I noticed that they like competing to see who the best is. Although they
are different, for example, Ortiz is more serious while playing while Justin enjoys joking around.
I kept track of my observations of Ortiz and Justin by taking observation notes. These
notes were taken during the last three play sessions I had with Ortiz and Justin. I recorded how
these two adolescents dealt with issues of survival and success that were similar to those that
impoverished adolescents have to deal with. How do Justin and Ortiz survive disappointment?
How do they rely on one another for friendship and ideas about how to overcome adversity?
How do they rely on one another to plan for future success?
Analysis
First Sample of Studies: Analysis of Personal Experience
After reading my ethnography and writing my own story of success and survival, I have
come to realize that people can also read situations as well as other people. Through writing my
first and second sample of studies, I have realized that reading is useful to surviving difficulties,
and it can be an important tool for setting goals. Some students may disagree with my claim and
say that in studying for my exams, I was studying for success. This is because they see my
studying to complete high school as studying to attain college admission. However, when I sat
for my exams my intention was only to be done with high school and to fulfill the expectations
that others had of me as a Kenyan high school student. Given that I did not perform well enough
to attain admission to a Kenyan university and I did not achieve the grades I wanted, I do not see
this as an instance of success. One limitation of my personal experience could be an instance
where I studied and achieved higher marks. Had this happened, then my definitions of reading,
survival, and success could change. Another limitation is that this paper has only spoken to my
experience and the experience of my ethnography author. Each of us has different goals and

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expectations for life, and each of us has different survival experience. For this reason, my
experience may not be applicable to many who read this paper.
In Kenya, students sit for a national exam at the end of the eighth grade and the twelfth
grade. The exam at the end of the eighth grade (KCPE) determines the high school that students
will attend, while the twelfth grade exam (KCSE) determines the university where students will
be enrolled. Because there are limited positions in high schools and the universities, these exams
are very nerve-racking. Those who fail do not continue in school. Therefore, in my final year of
high school at St. Lucie, Kiriri, I was under a lot of pressure to do well in my final exam.
Our teachers encouraged us to sacrifice our time and study and review particular subjects
such as Mathematics. For example our Mathematics teacher would distribute past papers among
us and help us to study them. We also made appointments and had private tuition with him. It
helped us be less nervous and to be confident in ourselves. I learnt not to listen to negative
opinions but to concentrate on the exam and also to improve on my weak points.
Even though I did not perform well on my university-entrance exams, I choose to see this
setback as an opportunity to seek out success. After all, I completed high school and received a
high school education, which many people in Kenya do not have. So I set the goal for myself of
achieving a university education. At first, I was able to join a good university, the Africa
Nazarene University, near my home. While at Nazarene, I set a new educational goal for myself
to attend college in the United States. This goal motivated me every day during my first semester
in Nazarene. I began to have a positive attitude towards my studies, viewing any challenge as
simply a stepping stone. I had to make sure my G.P.A was good because the college that I was
applying to required high grades, so I made sure that I did my work well. Finally I set aside time
to start working on my application to Principia College. The process of making sure that my

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application was perfect, and that my passport and visa were ready, was not an easy journey.
Luckily I was accepted to Principia which was really good news. I was happy I achieved my
goals, and I realized I had not only survived my transition from high school to college but I had
also succeeded.
My claims about reading experience explains how people may study for an exam but do
not achieve their goals. Later these people learn how to overcome challenges and set new goals.
My experience is similar to that of the adolescent street children I studied because they, like me,
go through processes of survival and success in their lives. I was able to survive through high
school, through studying the whole night. The adolescent street children I studied also survive by
providing each other with love, friendship and companionship. For example, the street children
help each other with saving money. They also share help each other by sharing food. Through all
the hardships, they are able to survive and successes in their own ways.
My success in being admitted to a college came when I did not expect but through
accepting the facts and trying to resolve where I went wrong motivated me to apply for a school
in the United States. The adolescent street children I studied also experienced success when they
earned enough money from their daily activities in the streets. For example, being able manage
and save their money is achieving success. They have strategies in managing their finances,
including bartering.
Connecting my story the adolescent readers has helped me realize that every individual
needs companionship with people they are familiar with. With the adolescent readers, they
support each through their different ways of interacting with people. By learning new things they
are able to figure out how to deal with situations together. As for me, my friends and I supported

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each other by studying and forming group discussions. Also the teachers supported us by helping
us improve our grades.
Second Sample of Studies: Analysis of My Ethnographic Reading
I studied two ethnographies in my class. My first ethnography is entitled Incidents in the
Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs, 2001). The author of this book describes how an African American
girl read her world to not only surviving slavery but escape from her oppressors. Throughout her
experience, she was afraid that her children would not survive without her, especially her
youngest child. She was afraid of the consequences of being caught in an escape attempt. This
kind of reading supported her survival. By understanding the risks of escape, she was able to
keep herself and her children alive from day to day. However, reading her world as a slave to
stay out of trouble did nothing to change her world. Even though someone could argue that she
was successful in preserving her life and the lives of her children, I would argue that her reading
to survive did nothing to change her oppressive condition. Only when the slave girl decided to
escape did success make its way into her life.
The slave girl made two attempts to escape that were designed to preserve her life and the
lives of her children. She knew that these escapes could change her life forever. She could be
free, and this freedom would allow her to win freedom for her children someday. The goals for
the escapes were clear. The children would be cared for by their grandmother. She would make
sure she was protected by travel at night in places where she would not be found. She was also
persistent in her goals. A failed escape attempt simply led to another. Someone might argue that
the slave girl was not successful because she failed to escape. However, her goal setting and
persistence with achieving her escape plans tells me that failure was not part of her life. She was
determined to be free.

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The second ethnography is studied is entitled (Conticini, A (2005) Livelihoods at the

Margins (Staples, J 2010) Children on the Streets of Dhaka and their Coping Strategies (75-100).
The children living in poverty that I read about value a lot of things that helps them to survive.
These children mostly value how they protect and promote their livelihoods. For example,
society stigmatizes Bangladeshi children living in the street using the term kangali which
means destitute. It refers to the complete or near complete absence of assets or control over
owned assets. From this they develop a negative attitude towards life and other people.
Although, the feeling of love, trusted friends, emotional support, sentimentality and affection
keeps them strong. For example, children participate in group activities while maintaining their
own independence.
The common theme that stands out in both the children living in the streets is how they
each have something they personally value and how they also value one another. Street children
provide each other with stable support through love, companionship and friendship. For example
love and friends make them feel at home on the streets. According to them, Home is not where
you sleep but is where you feel loved (Staples, 2010). Some refuse to return home for fear of
losing their friends. The social scientist Urie Bronfenbrenner (2013) would state that there is a
weak microsystem for the street children I read about. Bronfenbrenner (2013) defines a
microsystem is the closest to a child and contains the structures with which the child has direct
contact. The microsystem is mostly the relationships and interactions a child has with her
immediate surroundings. For example, the street children do not have their family next to them
and they do not go to school, making hard for them to be exposed to the elements in the
microsystem. However, Bronfenbrenner (2013) would say that the mesosytem of the street

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children is strong because of their strong relationship with friends and other new people they
meet. The mesosytstem includes peers and neighbors an adolescent sees at least once a week.
According to Maslows (2013) hierarchy of needs every individual has some needs they
need to survive. Physiological needs are things such as, food, water, breathing and sleep. The
physiological needs of adolescents struggling with poverty are met because they are able to
acquire food and water. They also have their way of resting. As for safety, the children in the
streets lack security. Security includes; the family, health, property and physical security. These
children are exposed to dangers of the world which is a great risk for their lives. A major human
need that they have is love and belonging. This need is evident in the friendship that they share,
friendship that is often interrupted by their safety and security needs. For example, an adolescent
street child may lose a friend to death or social displacement at any time.
Esteem is the feeling of confidence and comfort towards something. The street children
seem to be confidence in what they do. They seem comfortable with the fact that they live in
streets and do not what to go home. Self-actualization is being able to understand something and
achieving your goal. The street children accept the fact they in poverty but they try to survive
and create ways of how to earn a living and survive in the streets. Through Maslows hierarchy
of needs, the street children are able to develop their own ways of survival so as to achieve
success. For example, even though people despise them, the street children encourage one
another. They help each other. Eventually at the end of the day, they find some happiness in
what they have.
Third Sample of Studies: Analysis of My Experience with Developing Readers
As I observed the developing readers I discovered both Ortiz and Justin have patterns of
survival and success behavior. I noticed that they prefer approachable people who they can be

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able to interact freely. I noticed that they have a lot in common. For example, they both like
baseball, computer games and catch a flag. They enjoy discussing baseball and the different
techniques used to win a baseball game. Ortizs way of survival is by doing what he likes best.
For example he enjoys going for basketball practice every day. For Justin he enjoys playing with
friends at school and his neighbors. Their way of survival is by doing what is of interest to them
by learn from each other or learning from people who have the same interest as them.
Some of the patterns of behavior that I collected as I observed them were when they were
playing with my classmates. Ortiz and Justin enjoy playing catch the flag. They like to compete
to see who the best is. As the played, I noticed that Ortiz likes to feeling of being in charge and
making all the decisions. Because he loves the game, he mostly ended up winning all games. He
also liked teaming up with some of my classmates so as to win. As for Justin, he is also good at
playing catch the flag. He first tries to master some of the steps his opponents will use so that he
can do something else to defeat them. I also notice Justin like very playful compared to Ortiz
who more serious in playing the game in the correct way.
I was able to interview Justin and Ortiz to understand their behavior. Ortiz and Justin
mostly spend their time together after school. They both consider each other as best friends.
From the information I collected, Ortiz and Justin have different things they like other than
baseball and catch the flag. Justin described how he likes playing kickball, soccer and he also
enjoys climbing trees. This explains why he very playful. Ortiz likes eating burgers and
smoothies. His favorite subject in school is science. I think that explains why he enjoys making
his own decisions. The playfulness Justin has, combined with Ortizs decision making, made
them worthy opponents against the college students they played with. Both Justin and Ortiz
were able to explain to me in detail how they played to win against college students

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From studying their patterns of behavior and through the interviews, I noticed that, both
the adolescent readers support each other through playing and interacting with one another. This
supports my claim that children living in the streets provide each other with stable support
through love, companionship and friendship. Like the street children, Justin and Ortiz supported
each other as they played games against college students who were bigger and smarter than they
were. According to Maslows (2013) hierarchy of needs every individual has some needs they
need to survive. These are physiological needs, safety, love/belonging, esteem and lastly selfactualization. Physiological needs are things such as, food, water, breathing and sleep. Esteem is
the feeling of confidence and comfort towards something. Self-actualization is being able to
understand something and achieving your goal. From the behavior I observed, both the
adolescent readers are able to meet strong esteem and self-actualization needs. They both know
what they like best and how to take care of themselves without supervision. As for love and
belonging, it relates to the fact they use each other for stable support through playing, correcting
each other and meeting new people.
Forth Sample of studies: Analysis of my library research
My first article Conflict in the neighborhood: Street and Working Children in the Public
Space (Rehailu & Lewis, 1998) discussed public views of and reactions to children who work
and live in the streets. Street life is risky for children. The article mentions how in many places
of the world, street children and working children have been killed for no more than petty crimes
and haughty behavior.
Street children are defined by their personalities while working children are viewed by
the activities which include shoe polishing, selling groundnuts and working with taxi drivers. An
example is a study that shows that a small percentage of street children are defined by their

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behavior towards others while a larger percentage are defined by the work they do. Someone
may argue that given their behavior and occupations, street children and working children are the
same because they all dwell in the streets for the purpose of making a livelihood. I disagree
because street children and working children are different.
The public and the police have a perception that children in the streets are poor, violent
and criminals. The press also emphasizes the bad boy view of children exposed to the street life.
Rehailu and Lewis (1998) argue that many street children have been abused and neglected
because of the false assumptions the public have about them. It could be argued that street
children are a disturbance to the public, and this may be a reason for the public and the police to
be hostile to the street children. However, not all street children and working children are violent
and deserve to be treated as criminals.
Children in the street face dangers such as murder and physical abuse. The childrens
worst fear is not of going hungry or missing security from their families but hostility from the
public and police. For example, Rehailu and Lewis show that the number of street children killed
in Brazil is more than those killed in the civil war in Lebanon. A different perspective is that
some of the street children commit crimes and therefore, the police cannot be blamed for the
deaths. Either argument cannot refute the dangerous lives street children lead.
My second article was Adolescent Career Development in Urban-Residing Aboriginal
Families in Canada (Marshall. S et al, 2011). It is based on research and discusses how the
family has an important role to play in influencing the outcome of adolescents. Most of the
research done is in samples of cultural groups in North America. Families in urban areas have a
big role to play in the development and education of adolescents. The article discusses how

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residents of poor neighborhoods have an effect on youths future employment opportunities.

Youth living in poor neighborhoods also suffer discrimination which lowers their self-esteem.
The article discusses research done about the influence of family support in relation to
career adaptability, career planning and certain occupational choices. Research shows that some
parents and adolescents engage in joint actions that influence good career choices. These joint
actions include having dinner together or spending the day together and help young people to
construct positive identities.
As I researched my two articles on street children, I found out that they both relate to my
claim that children living in the streets provide each other with stable support through love,
companionship and friendship. My first article talks about the harsh treatments that street
children experience. In order to survive, they support each other by working for money and
protecting each other from the public and the police. Rehailu and Lewis (1998) also relates to my
claim because it shows how the loving support of parents may influence the decisions made by
adolescents as they grow up.
Bronfenbrenners (2013) ecological systems theory of human behavior shows how
external issues can influence the development of an individual. Bronfenbrenners ecological
system consists of microsystems, mesosystems, exosystems and macrosystems. All of these
systems relate to Rehailu and Lewis (1998) findings about the social ecology of street children.
Street children and working children all have a microsystem. The microsystem describes the
family, peers, school, church and health services as well as the individual. For the street children
the microsystem only includes their peers. They lack family, school and church. The mesosystem
is the point where the exosystem and the microsystem overlap. Working children return back
home while the street children live in the streets. The working children are exposed to their

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families who introduce them to church and other activities. But the children living in the streets
do not have strong microsystems without adults to introduce them to community members.
The exosystem includes social services available to individuals, mass media to which
they are exposed, local politics and industry. The exosystems of working and street children is
mostly related to the activities they involve themselves in the streets. For example, the working
children and street children in Rhailu and Lewis (1998) study mostly sell groundnuts or polish
shoes. The exosystem of the street children includes mass media that presents street children and
working children as a threat to society. These street and working children have no social services
available to them, and with the information presented it could not be determined what local
politics they are exposed to.
The macrosystem describes the attitudes and the ideologies of the culture
(Bronfenbrenner, 2013). The macrosystem of street children is almost nonexistent because most
of them are not in school or have families that instill values and ideas other than those needed to
survive in the streets. Because of this, they may be unfamiliar with the morals of their culture.
Even though the adolescents described in this article lack stable support systems via the family,
they compensate for what they do not have by building connections with their peers that are
nearly as strong as family ties.
In the second article, the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem and macrosystem
described are strong. The research done on the adolescents show that their parents have exposed
them to different things, for example school, church and other activities such as sports. They
have strong microsystems with family, church, peers and accessible health services. They have
access to social services, as described in the exosystem. Their parents instill in them the attitudes

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and ideologies of their culture (macrosystem). As a result the adolescents are able to make good
decisions for the future.
Maslows hierarchy of human needs relates to my findings because according to the first
article the street children require physiological needs, love/belonging, safety, esteem and selfactualization. Street children lack in terms of physiological needs. They do not have guaranteed
food, water or shelter. Working children earn some money and are able to provide for themselves
and their families. They also have a place to live where they return at the end of the day. Both
street and working children do not have safety, or protection of their body. This is because the
police beat or kill them on the assumption that they are engaged in illegal activities. The article
reports that street and working children are not scared of going hungry but are scared that their
lives may in danger at any time.
The adolescents studied in the second article have their physiological needs provided for.
They have food and shelter. They are also safe, loved, self-confident and given the opportunity to
reach self-actualization. They have been brought up in an urban environment where their parents
make sure their needs are met so that they may develop well.
Conclusion
The purpose of writing this paper is explain broadly about My claim that children living
in the streets provide each other with stable support through love, companionship and friendship.
From the two articles I researched and my two ethnographies I read, I was able to find out that
children require some kind of support that will help conquer their everyday life. For example,
Livelihoods at the Margins (Staples, 2010), the children living in the streets of Bangladesh
support each other through love, friendship and also sharing food. As for me I used my teachers
and friends get through the hard times before the final exam. I believe my new knowledge about

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22

reading can help befriend someone by helping them with something they have difficulty in. By
focusing on how we read one another and our world, my friend and I can help each other and
support each other. As I finish this paper, I still have a few divergent questions in mind: Why are
street children not interested in going to school? What can school intuitions do to help street
children? What are the roles of children in a family? Who should be the best role model for a
developing child? I will pursue these questions as I continue to think about the survival and
success of street children in the world.

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23

References
Jacobs, H. (2001). Incidents in the life of a slave girl. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.
Conticini, A. (2005) Children on the Streets of Dhaka and their Coping Strategies
(Staples, J,

2010, Ed). Livelihoods at the Margins (pg. 75-100). Walnut Creek, CA: Left

Coast Press.
Rehailu, A & Lewis, A. (1998). Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research. Conflict
in the neighborhood: Street and working children in the public space, 4 (4) 477-487.
Marshall. S, Young. R, Stevens. A, Spence, Wayne, Deyell. S, Easterbrook. A
& Brokenleg. M, (2011). Career Development Quarterly. Adolescent Career Development in
Urban-Residing Aboriginal Families in Canada, 56(6) 540-550.