What is money? What does it get you? If you only had $2 a day to live off of how would you survive? These are questions many of us do not know the answer to because our lives are privileged and we do not have to face the problem of not having enough. The book $2 A Day by Katherine Edin and Luke Shaefer shows the struggles of how to survive off of $2 a day.
In short the struggles the people in the stories go through are how to apply for welfare and also qualify to get welfare/food stamps, because if you did not know welfare is pretty much extinct. Other struggles these people face are finding a safe place for them and their family to live. Specifically in one story a mother and her two children were living with her uncle and she came home to her uncle raping her daughter so they went from having a home (even though it was unsafe) to being back on the streets.
In addition imagine you are ten years old again…what would be your biggest concern at that time in your life? For one of the people in this book her parents had left her alone on the streets at the age of ten and she had to figure out how to live and grow up. This to me was a reality check that nothing in my life is that bad and horrible and that when I have a bad day I need to take a step back and realize my problems are very miniscule compared to most peoples.
How far would you go to survive if you had $2 a day? The conclusions these people come up with are extreme. So…what would you do?
Hey Ellie, great job on your presentation today. This is an interesting question that you posed to the class. At first I was stumped as to what I would do with $2 a day. Like you mentioned, I’ve never had to think about what I would do to scrape by, which is why this question initially came as a surprise. I then thought about stealing to be able to resell and purchase food or other necessities to live. It’s interesting that my mind jumped to acting in a way that is illegal and frowned upon. I think that if the system is ultimately failing me, then I will cheat the system in order to survive. I don’t know what I would actually do in this situation, but I think the question can clarify our judgements when we see homeless people.