essay

What Is The Difference? By Katie Thomas. Everywhere we live, we face many social problems. Considering the amount of social problems people encounter in their life is a tremendous amount but do all of them have solutions? Also, do all of these people learn something from their own social problem? In Leading The Way: Young Women’s Activism for Social Change edited by Mary K. Trigg, this anthology includes essays by young activists. In chapter twelve, Giving Voice to the Unheard by Kristen Lyons Maravi, she mentions about her own social problem with poverty and how much it had affected her. Also, she finds her own solution to her problem. Moreover I would like to compare this chapter with another chapter because these two chapters are very similar to each other, chapter one, Going Back Home by Kristy Clementina Perez. Perez discusses that she grew up in Perth Amboy struggling to figure out her place in the world. Also Perez mentions, when she was old enough to realize that life was imperfect and before she knew that some people lives were more difficult than others. Even before she added the words “difference” and “inequality” to her own vocabulary. Even though Perez discovered the world isn’t perfect, she wasn’t scared of poverty because she’s very familiar with it already. She also finds a solution to her own social problem like Maravi.
Maravi thought her family was poor when growing up because they didn’t go on long vacations and shopped at Shop Rite brand. Because of her parents, she was good at checking unit prices of goods at a young age. Then she realizes from her nice middle class house in the northwestern suburbs of New Jersey, there were kids living in Trenton who had little to eat and would have loved to shop at Shop Rite cold cuts. Later when she got to college and lived in a low-income community in New Brunswick that reality of class differences began to brother her. Living in New Brunswick made her realize there are many poor people in the United