Dasani Showed Us What It’s Like to Grow Up Homeless. She’s Still Struggling.
Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City
By Andrea Elliott
Best we can tell, there are 1.38 million homeless schoolchildren in the United States. About one in 12 live in New York City. Several years ago, readers of this paper got to meet one, an 11-year-old Black girl with an unforgettable name: Dasani.
Nina Subin |
For five straight days in December 2013, the front page of The New York Times focused on a child who lived in the Auburn Family Residence, a homeless shelter in Brooklyn. She was named after the bottled water her mother would have never spent good money on, just as Chanel, Dasani’s mother, was named for the posh French perfume. Dasani did back flips at bus stops and could best the boys in a pull-up contest. At home, she looked after her siblings, changing diapers and making sandwiches, giving the other children the middle pieces of the loaf and taking the ends for herself. Even her formidable school principal called her a “precocious little button” and believed her potential to be limitless.