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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Here is the link to my audio interview:
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