Vanessa Hales fortælling om et liv i modgang

Hi, my name is [NAVN A], and I would like to share my story. I am 21 years old, and I live in a college dorm now. I used to live in a neighbourhood far away from here, but it was not that rich anyway, we were very poor. My mother died when my little sister was born, and my father started doing drugs. Before the incident we were a normal, happy family. Everything was fine, I mean yes, we were poor, and all that, but my father taught us to take the time to create things we wanted, so that it meant something, instead of just buying it from the store. But one day, my father started to come home early in the morning and left at afternoon, we always woke up when he came home at 5:00AM, he was very loud, my sister is only 5 years old, she never spoke to anyone, we were very scared. My father doesn’t have a job, he got fired because he never came to work. We got homeless. I quit school to be able to afford food for my sister and I. I had two jobs, but it wasn’t enough. I was a cashier and a babysitter. I had a tight schedule. I was working from 8:00AM to 3:00PM as a cashier, and from babysitting it could take hours and sometimes even days. The parents were businessmen. They were traveling a lot because of it. The only reason why I was working as a babysitter, was because my sister and I could sleep in a warm place. It was hard, not only physically, but also emotionally, the fatigue was unbearable. The next day came and I was late to work, it was certainly not the first time, and my boss fired me. The only thing I could do was, to go back to the house, where I was babysitting the baby. Then the parents found out that I was spending more time at their house. They felt that it was offensive, and they fired me. A couple of days went by, and that’s when I got the thought of prostituting myself. At first it was once a week, but then it kind of escalated to every other day, it was horrible, but I thought that it was the only thing I could do. I almost got discovered many times by the police, but then one day I got discovered, I was 15. I wasn’t going to prison, luckily. But they decided that my sister and I were going to be moved to an orphanage. Now I’m in college and soon I would be graduating. I hope one day that no one would ever do the things I did. I regret it.