City boy grows up fast to give family a chance

[Shardik]

This is a copy of DogPoundPup's OP in LBN. Please bother to go to the link and read the whole story.

Source: Courier-Post

CAMDEN — While other children play games or watch television, 10-year-old Chris Little spends his free time searching the streets for cans and bagging groceries at a neighborhood store.

Nobody asked him to do these things. The Parkside Elementary fifth-grader started looking for ways to earn money all on his own, because, he explained, "I saw my mom was struggling and I was trying to do my best."

His mom, Carole Bell, said she found out she had cervical cancer when she was pregnant with Chris. She underwent treatment, she said, but then the cancer returned. By last year, she said, she was too sick to work; by the summer, so sick "I couldn't barely get up to go to the bathroom."

Bell found herself trying to calculate an impossible equation: how to care for four boys on a fixed income of about $400 a month in child support. Friends gave her hefty breaks on rent, and the boys -- three sons aged 7, 8 and 10 and a 10-year-old nephew she takes care of -- pitched in around the house.

Read more: http://www.courierpostonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/200811090310/NEWS01/811090406