Living In My Head

THE HAWK CLAN WOMEN (The End)

2010-03-15T11:49:00.000-04:00

So far, I have clocked over 60 hours at the Hawk Clan’s home. A fourth girl joined in (the only one who didn’t need help 60 visits ago, has gone from straight A’s to straight F’s) and I seem to spend my off-the-clock hours looking for material to keep them interested. (How does one teach fractions, word problems, mixed numbers and percent, in a fun-let’s-do-it-again way?) While I work at the

THE HAWK CLAN WOMEN (PART III)

2010-02-27T15:06:00.000-05:00

Then comes Dalilah. She is sixteen, dropped out of school in the seventh grade, hasn’t touched a book since (three years) and now wants to get her GED. She has similar indigenous traits to her two younger sisters, and if put together, you couldn’t tell that they have different fathers. She has tiny teeth somewhere behind a mangle of braces that haven’t been brushed in a while. Her hands are

THE HAWK CLAN WOMEN (Part II)

2010-02-14T19:42:00.001-05:00

After Esmeralda, comes Mariah. She is twelve, going on thirteen, is in the fifth grade and has a set of mischievous eyes and an infectious giggle. Like Esmeralda, Mariah hasn’t seen her backpack in a while, doesn’t know what kind of grades she is getting at school and gives me a blank stare when I ask her which classes besides Math and Language she is being taught. “Nothing, I think,” she says.

THE HAWK CLAN WOMEN (Part I)

2010-02-08T15:24:00.001-05:00

It’s a nice neighborhood. Two-story houses with manicured front yards, enclosed swimming pools and high wooden fences. It’s a middle class community fifteen minutes away from a swanky shopping mall with Sephora, Pottery Barn, Anthropologie and many other high-end boutiques. The house that I’m looking for is in a cul de sac. From a distance it looks as though it has been either recently built or

We are the world/ We are the children... So let's start giving/

2010-01-29T20:25:00.001-05:00

First came Band Aid, the charity band of Irish and British musicians who in 1984 raised funds for famine relief in Ethiopia with the multimillion sale of their song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” We bought the single. It was criminal not to help save a country “where nothing ever grows nor rain or rivers flow…” Following the success in the UK, an American benefit single for African famine relief

Haitians in South Florida

2010-01-21T15:34:00.000-05:00