I WONDER WHY

When I was a child I wondered about many things. One thing I wondered about was handicapped people. I used to look at them and used to think why God created them differently. I never could understand that it was rude to stare at handicapped people. I remember seeing a person who's arm was missing. I just couldn't help but stare at the place where the arm was supposed to be. There was another person that I saw that had sunglasses on and a dog with them all the time. They were blind people but to me they were the strange people who always wore sunglasses. Now I am older and I know that there are people who are very helpless in this world. Some people are helpless because they are disabled. Other people are unfortunate for being in a natural disaster or suffering from poverty.

Last year my parents took us to visit to their foreign country in Asia. They used to live in a country that was both poor and small, a country known as Bangladesh. When I arrived there, I realized that I was lucky to be living in America. At least America didn't have any poverty. I wondered how a place could be so poor. There were people living on the streets, and there were many panhandlers here and there. Although the place was poor, the place where I stayed was a nice neighborhood and it gave me a warm feeling inside. I soon came to like the place a lot. While I was in Bangladesh I grew more and more curious about the poverty there. I wondered why the panhandlers there weren't working instead of begging. I didn't know that they didn't have money and with so many people suffering from poverty they couldn't get employed as well. Unlike other wealthy countries like America the poverty stricken people of Bangladesh didn't have social welfare benefits as well. One other thing I wondered about was the people who worked in my grandma's house. At my grandma's house there were people who would be working and apparently living there. I wondered who they were and why they were there. They helped my grandma with the house hold chores like doing the laundry, preparing the table, cleaning the floor and doing the dishes. Some of them were barely seven or eight years old. When I asked my grandma who those children were she answered that they were the poor children from the ghetto, who couldn't even afford to go to school. They came here to help her so that they could earn money to provide some food for them and their families. I felt sympathy for those poor children who had to go to such extreme levels to get their families some food. When I first came to my grandma's house I felt sad to see them working so hard. But after spending a couple of weeks at my grandma's house I was surprised to see that they were happy to work and get the chance to have some food and shelter for them and their families. As I grew in America I never thought that there are children in other parts of the world who can't get the opportunity to go to school and have their basic needs fulfilled. I felt very lucky to be a citizen of the richest country of the world. When I came back to Los Angeles I was both happy and relieved to see my friends and family again. I was glad to know that at least poverty didn't exist in America. But last month when I went to Downtown LA I saw many poverty-stricken people living on the streets. Then the next couple of weeks I saw on the TV that many poor people had died in the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. They had no help for days and many people died there. I felt bad that even a wealthy country like America could have poverty. There were helpless needy people all through out the world and I wondered why America was no exception.