Multimedia Project

I’ve lived in Danville for thirteen years. My mother homeschooled me for most of my life and I began attending Danville public schools in fifth grade; all of my friends lived in Danville with me. For the first couple years here at Uni I felt right at home but recently I have begun to feel split between my school and my hometown. The socio-economic and cultural gap between the two communities is an increasing problem and because of it I don’t quite fit into either community anymore.

I find a stark contrast between my reality and the life of your average Uni student. My parents are divorced and I don’t have much communication with my father. My mom is a single mother and our family operates mainly off of the child support my father is required to pay. We fit in as upper-lower-class, and my mom has a very hands-off and trusting approach to parenting; thus I like to think I am rather independent. The majority of my life has been spent in Danville among people who are completely used to situations like mine, if not in a similar one themselves. It’s difficult to switch to a totally opposite community where not many understand what it’s like for money to be tight enough that our lives revolve around when my mom gets her paycheck, or what it’s like to have an overloaded single mother in a chaotic house full of kids. No matter how hard my friends in the Uni community try, they sometimes simply can’t fathom life without the privilege they’re accustomed to.

On one hand there’s Uni, a close-knit, friendly community of well-educated families who have worked very hard to achieve success. Then there’s Danville, a large and gritty community of mainly lower- to middle-class children of people who never quite managed to make it out of the quicksand that is a small hometown. The two worlds are already so different, and to make matters worse each world looks down on the other. My Uni friends see Danville people as ghetto, trashy, and painfully mediocre while my Danville friends see Uni people as pretentious, rich, and socially inept. The negative views each world has of the other upsets and affects me, but the people in each world are so different that their superiority complexes were inevitable. For example, the average Uni student would describe school and grades as incredibly important and essential and spend a lot of time outside of school studying or in extracurriculars that will beef up their college applications. My friends back home put a lot of focus on school, but school’s definitely not the most important thing in their life. I appreciate how much realer and grittier my Danville people are. Although neither world can completely understand me and my situation, Danville comes closest. They value relationships and enjoying life and spend their time hanging out with people, partying, going out, and being active. Because of their more reckless lifestyle, they end up getting involved in a lot of drama and issues such as pregnancy scares and police busts. It’s crazy when you think about how drastically different each world is.

Ultimately I’m not at all ashamed of my socio-economic status. If anything I’m proud of it- my economic class has given me experiences that my Uni friends don’t even know exist. I am an exponentially more independent, aware, and fully-developed person than most of the students I know at Uni because of my lifestyle and the struggles I have faced. I consider myself much more of a “whole” person because of the different perspectives I’ve experienced. Because of the independence, understanding of the world, awareness, and emotional maturity I have that most Uni students don’t, I wouldn’t give my lower-class background up for the world.

For this project I have decided to highlight the poverty that goes on in Danville, because I think that a lot of Uni students could benefit from hearing about lower-class lives that sound awful and crazy to us but are completely normal and expected among poor communities in Danville. I ended up interviewing my mom, who works at a local elementary school, about her experiences with children in poverty and how it affects them so that I could give you just a taste of what life is actually like outside of the upper-middle class world, just forty-five minutes away.
Here is the link to my audio interview: 
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