Girl in the Shadows: Dasani's Homeless Life

[TheMightyFavog]

Last edited Mon Dec 9, 2013, 12:22 PM - Edit history (1)

http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/invisible-child/

Dasani is a homeless girl living in a shelter in New York. The New York Times began following her last year to tell her story.

She wakes to the sound of breathing. The smaller children lie tangled beside her, their chests rising and falling under winter coats and wool blankets. A few feet away, their mother and father sleep near the mop bucket they use as a toilet. Two other children share a mattress by the rotting wall where the mice live, opposite the baby, whose crib is warmed by a hair dryer perched on a milk crate.

(snip)

Even her name, Dasani, speaks of a certain reach. The bottled water had come to Brooklyn’s bodegas just before she was born, catching the fancy of her mother, who could not afford such indulgences. It hinted at a different, upwardly mobile clientele, a set of newcomers who over the next decade would transform the borough.

Dasani’s own neighborhood, Fort Greene, is now one of gentrification’s gems. Her family lives in the Auburn Family Residence, a decrepit city-run shelter for the homeless. It is a place where mold creeps up walls and roaches swarm, where feces and vomit plug communal toilets, where sexual predators have roamed and small children stand guard for their single mothers outside filthy showers.

It is no place for children. Yet Dasani is among 280 children at the shelter. Beyond its walls, she belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America.

[newfie11]

1. This will never be seen on the evening news nt

[JHB]

2. But it is the feature front page story of the New York Times today...

...Page 1, above the fold, photo of the girl just below the NYT banner.

[Javaman]

3. Link no longer works. nt

[TheMightyFavog]

4. Fixed.

Thanks!

[Javaman]

5. Thanks! nt