MIRACLES FROM THE STREETS OF NYC - PART 4

TEEN HUNGER AND STARVATION!

As a kid I experience hunger in a way that no child should... forced to pan handle was the only option.

After many years I graduated to bigger and better things.

After my mom relocated our family to the Bronx I experienced a different kind of poverty and hunger.

In our desperation my brother and I were only allowed to eat one slice of bread perday and one hot meal... we had to wait for our mother to came home from work to make us the only meal we would see till the next day.

Things were so bad one day my mother asked us to stop eating the slice bread because she wasn't able to make her lunch. I obeyed her, and my brother did for a while. Later my mom blamed me for eating bread. I was so mad at my brother because I knew for a fact he was taken what could have or should have been my part for himself.

The next morning or afternoon in our despair we decided to go after a rat with the thought to fry it or boil it... we must have chased it around our apartment for about an hour. It hid under my mother's couch or bed till we cornered it and killed it.

I might have kicked it with my shoe or dropped a heavy object.

I quickly swept it with a broom and pan handle and placed the rodent over the stove and into a frying pan.

As it's nose bleed I looked out the window, unsure how to skin an animal.

A neighbor was having a party and a few were eating and drinking some pop.

I would have given anything to have what they had. Instead I was faced with two options, go back to begging or man up and start eating rats.

I foolishly choose to be a man, but not before looking back and forth and saw my situation for what it was. I knew at that age something was serious wrong, I felt left behind... the system failed us and it was up to me.

When I lit the stove, suddenly I heard my brother Chris excitement. He was overjoyed, I could hear my mother walking through the door. We have groceries my brother said.

In an instant I through the rodent into the garage and the pan into the covers.

That day at work my mother asked a male friend a co-worker to loan her some money, for without it we would have starved and worse I could have seriously hurt myself and died from some sort of bacteria infection. 

Like a few times before my mother saved our lives... she is the hero of my story.