Prompt: 1 (473 words)
The time is 11:00 p.m. and I sit restlessly at my tiny study table. Books, papers, and other school supplies are crammed by my side. The aroma of my mother cooking traditional Bengali food escapes from the kitchen and into my room where it slowly fills up my nose. During this time, I am tackling a difficult calculus problem or finishing up a long essay while I desperately try to stay awake, knowing it will take a couple more hours before I finish homework and get any sleep. I hear heavy footsteps enter my room and stop a few feet away from me.
“Still doing homework?” My father say in Bengali, his tired voice resonating through the room. “Make sure study hard so that you can get a good career and you won’t have to go through…show more content… When we experience the truth about what atrocities are happening outside of the United States, it often changes our view of the world and shapes who we become. At least, that is what happened to me when I went on a vacation to Bangladesh.
On the summer of 2013, my family went to visit relatives in Bangladesh. Everytime, my family and I would go outside to shop or visit historic sites, it wasn’t difficult to see the multiple slums that were located throughout the cities of Bangladesh. When would pass by these slums, many penurious people would come up to us and beg for money. Although panhandling exists in the United States, there were visibly stark differences between the mendicants in the US and mendicants in Bangladesh. The mendicants in Bangladesh were in complete…show more content… They also were not able to get job, this was mainly due to their bodies not being able to fully support them. I saw multiple people who were missing a limb or an eye and others who were completely disabled. Additionally, there were also people who were succumbing to vicious diseases that were mostly due to an inadequate distribution of clean water and nutritious food. Many of these people’s children were not attending school and were severely malnourished. Their lives could not be changed for the better and they had no opportunities in improve their situations because the government doesn’t give them much aid. I distinctly remember a woman coming up to my mother to beg for money. The women was cradling her baby in her arm, but she was missing an eye and her child seemed awfully thin. Unfortunately, my family couldn’t do much for these people because my family is a low-income family and we couldn’t afford to help all of them. All we could do is give them small scants of money when they asked
