The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation Currently there are about 600,000 people who live in the South Bronx and about 434,000 who live in Washington Heights and Harlem. This area makes up one of the most racially segregated areas of poor people in the United States. In this book we focus on racially segregated areas of poor people in the United States. In this book we focus on Mott Haven, a place where 48,0000 of the poorest people in the South Bronx live. Two thirds of the people are Hispanic, one-third is black and thirty-five percent are children. There are nearly four thousand heroin users, and one-fourth of the women who are tested are positive for HIV. All of this, and much more in one little area of the South Bronx. In the middle of all this chaos and confusion are children. Children who have daily drills on what to do if gunshots are heard, children who know someone who has died of AIDS, children who have seen someone been shot right in front of their face wondering if its their father, children who long to be sanitation workers, and children who die everyday. The lives of these children almost seem lost with depression, drugs, and death all around them. Mott Haven seems like a place that no one could even imagine existing. A place so distant from most peoples reality that it could only exist in a Spike Lee film. A government owned ghetto that people are just thrown into when the don't fit into normal society. A place that can be shunned and feared and easy to get away from simply by shutting a newspaper. One would think that the resources necessary to get these people back on their feet would be available but we see that they aren't. Children still die from falling into faulty elevators, people die from having to wait 4 days in a hospital corridor just to receive treatment, fires occur on a daily basis, rats are like a family pet when not gnawing on a defenseless baby for the third time, soup kitch...
