“These people just live in a whole new world:”
The Story of Amber
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Demographics: Puerto Rican, Latin American Female, First Generation
Tags: Food Insecurity, Scholarships, Culture Shock, Working Student, Covid 19
ElevenLabs_Amber.mp3
My name is Amber. I am originally from Puerto Rico. I moved here when I was about three to four years old. Originally, my family didn't really have anything, so we stayed with my aunt for a couple of years until we were able to find our own place to live. Uh, it wasn't that great. Then, when I was about 13, we finally rented our own house, and then, you know, we've been back and forth finding more places to rent and everything.At 13, it got harder because now I was living in a single-parent household, so my mom struggled to put food on the table and everything. So my siblings, Thomas and Jasmine, and I worked in order to help out and get some food. So, it was a lot of fast food, and there was a lot of food that was easy and cheap to make–like rice and beans and chicken, you know, the basics.
My mom worked at the school as a lunch lady, and we were good friends with her boss. He would sometimes have us cater, and he would kind of hire us. But it was under-the-table work, cause at that age, we were 11, 12, 13 years old. So we would cater places, and he would give us a couple of bucks, about 40 bucks each, and then pay my mom. Once we turned 16 and could officially get jobs, each of us got jobs. Most of them were also in fast food places, stuff like that. So we worked throughout high school, we worked a lot. It was stressful because most of us, well, my siblings, were basically trying to get as many hours as possible, so we would work a lot of night shifts. I would work the night shift/closing shift at a fast food restaurant during my senior year of high school, and that was not easy at all. I would get home maybe 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning and since my mom was the lunch lady, she would have to leave and take us to the high school with her at around 5:00 in the morning. So, I barely got any sleep throughout my last year there. It was very stressful.
I'd always been really focused on school, but I did notice a dip in my grades. Instead of getting As, I was getting Bs and Cs, but my teachers also worked with me a lot 'cause my school was a very underprivileged school. So they understood a lot of the students had a lot of stuff that they were working on outside of school. Then, COVID happened during my senior year. So yeah, when COVID happened, instead of going to online school and everything, I just was deemed an essential worker. So, I just took those hours and kind of quit school and just worked because my mom was the lunch lady, the school was closed, and she wasn't gonna make any money. Luckily, my teachers were very forgiving and understanding and just let me pass anyway, so it didn't affect my GPA, thankfully.
I genuinely really don't know how I got away with it, but I didn't go to any classes and I didn't do any work even though they would email me. So, I felt like, well, school stopped, I'm working, that's it, whatever. They did reach out and I was like, "I'm sorry, I'm just busy working. I don't have time to do my assignments and then do my end-of-the-year work and everything." It was March when everything happened. So it was the end of the year, end of the semester–senior year stuff. So I didn't do any of that. My parents had us when they were young. My mom just recently turned 41 in December, so she had us young. She also grew up food-insecure and everything, and so did my dad. I could tell it was very stressful for her to have three kids on top of having to provide for them all by herself, which was tough. Then once COVID happened, she wasn't able to do it. She had to rely on us to find jobs and everything.
But yeah, she is very strong. I wouldn't say she's very financially literate, and I don't know if that's a cultural difference that she doesn't know how to handle in the US or a language barrier. But, you know, I help her out a lot with that now.My brother, Thomas, he's also very strong. He is more of the, “I gotta grind, I gotta work,” type of person. Like right now, he has two jobs working at a factory full-time, and then, as a waiter part-time. We're both trying to get a place after I graduate to live together. He can move out of my uncle's house, and I can have somewhere to go after I graduate. So we're both working right now, and he is very much grinding and constantly working. My sister, Jasmine, is also working constantly, but she doesn't have the, "I have to do this”-drive, you know? She'll get a job, and she'll constantly be like, "Oh, I don't want this job, I want something else." Then she'll move to another job. So she's very fluctuating.
I came to Opportunity University with a couple of scholarships. I came in with an institutional scholarship and a private scholarship. I’ve had the private scholarship since high school. So that one I had to do the whole interview process to get the scholarship my freshman year of high school. It guaranteed that for, I think, six schools in the state. the scholarship's founder, would pay for my four years there. But it's also my job to get as many scholarships as I can, and they'll pay the leftovers. I have to do the FAFSA and everything, and they'll make sure that I'm set for the four years that I'm here.Without those scholarships, it would’ve been very difficult and different from how I live now. Now I don't have to worry so much; I can go to the student center and get a pizza or chicken fingers. Without that, I don't know what I would do, honestly. I would have to rely solely on the University pantry to get food, which I do rely on still. I also work there now, which is great, but I would like to find a better part-time job. I didn’t know, it would be very difficult, especially with my course load. Yeah, it would just be hard. I couldn’t imagine how difficult it would be.
Coming into school was stressful. I didn't have a kitchen in the first place, so I was like, "Well, I'm not gonna cook because my freshman year, I was in a dorm room." There's not many options other than the microwave, so it was stressful. I made sure that I rationed my meal plans because I could get 14 meals a week. So I had to ration to make sure that I was like, "Okay, I'm getting enough each day," you know? That way, I can make it last for 14 days, well, 14 meals. So yeah, it was stressful.I think the stress and anxiety did impact my grades because I didn't eat much in the first place. I'll eat maybe two meals a day and be like, "Okay, that's good. I don't need another one." I don't know if that's just 'cause of how I was raised, or if I just have a small appetite. But I don't know, I feel the stress of, “Okay, I'm going to have this amount of time, so I'm going to get something at the student center before I have class. Then eat one last thing at the student center before I have to do some more studying”. So I guess just the stress of it impacted my grades because it was always on my mind. Not just the food insecurity, but all the other stuff like, “do I have enough money for this? Do I have enough money for that?” impact. It's on my mind 24/7.
Having a lot on my mind, I'm used to it. I always was very conscious of how much money my family had, how much we were struggling, and all that. So it was something that always was on my mind. I not only had to worry about myself, because I still had to help out my siblings and my mom, I sort of reached a point where it was like I wasn't functioning. It was like I was dragging myself out everywhere I went, you know? In my junior year, I reached out to the wellness center, and they got me in contact with therapy there. That has been a huge help. My therapists have been really, really understanding, and they have helped me out a lot, actually. Like finding stuff that I need, and figuring out how to lessen the load a little bit.
I started using the University pantry my sophomore year of college 'cause freshman year it was COVID still, so I didn't know anything that was going on in campus. I was just in my dorm 24/7. But sophomore year, my friend and I, who was from the same town as me, we heard about the University pantry, and we're like, "We should go," 'cause he's also food-insecure. We have similar stories, so we definitely should go to the pantry and take advantage of it, which we did. We would go once every other week, and get some food. Yeah, I would utilize the University pantry pretty often until I started working there this year, last semester.Using the University pantry did help me create some sort of a safety net. I think what helped is knowing that if I didn’t have food in the fridge, there was a place I could go to that would give me something. If it weren't exactly what I wanted to have, there was still always another option. Like if there wasn't any rice, there would be pasta. If there wasn't any pasta, there would be some canned food I could make on my own. There would be bread all the time. So knowing that there was a safety net so I didn't always have to be like, "Oh, I have to figure out how I'm gonna get this, how I'm gonna get that," you know?
When I moved... In my sophomore year, they moved me from a dorm to the Opportunity Houses, which has a kitchen. And I think it's a lot of cultural stuff because the food here is very different from Puerto Rican food. So I never really felt full or satisfied. This is all the food you would get at a fast-food restaurant, and it's not satisfying for me. So I would go to the University pantry when I wanted to cook something. Like, if I wanted some rice, they had little rice packets, and I could make myself some rice. Um, I could make myself some beans and some sandwiches too. I didn't use the school’s fresh food program because I always had a class on Friday during that time, so I never got to use it. But they sometimes would still have some vegetables on the normal days when they were open that I would take.It would kind of be embarrassing because my roommates had their pantries full, they had their fridges full, and it kind of became sort of a joke. One time, we had guests over, and I grew up always offering people something if they're at my place, but I didn't have anything except for strawberries and water. So I would say, "I have some strawberries and water if you want some." And it sort of became a joke with my roommates, whenever somebody was over, they would offer that. It was kind of stuff like that, just little stuff that I thought was normal, but my roommates would be like, "Oh, I never had to think about it like that."
College was different from how I grew up in my hometown. Most of us in my hometown were Latin American, so most of us have families from Latin America. We all would have that in common. Most of us have families who are constantly working and constantly kind of struggling, so we also would have that in common. So, in high school, we talked about it like it was very normal, you know? Then when I came to college, it was kind of a culture shock to be like, "Oh some of these people genuinely never had to worry about that. They never considered whether their parents would be able to pay the light or gas bills." They never had to worry about food on the table. They never had to give their parents money to help them while they were just kids. So that was a huge culture shock. Now, it's like, there's a fundamental part that I don't understand about most of the people here, and a fundamental part they won't understand about me because we are so different growing up, you know?
It made it difficult in some ways because I still operate under the impression that this is obvious. Of course, I'm gonna be worrying about my food. Of course, I'm gonna worry about how I'm gonna pay for this or that or whatever, and I'm always thinking people understand that, or people instantly put that into consideration. I have to tell professors or friends who wanna go out that "I can't." And they're like, "Why?" So I'm like, "Well, what do you think? If I don't have this, I won't spend money on a club or something." I kind of had to give a disclaimer, like, "By the way, I can't do this or do that 'cause I just can't." They would ask "Why?" Like, "Well, 'cause I can't afford it or, yeah, I just can't. It's not something that I can feasibly do." I don't have a car, so I would have to rely on somebody else, and I don't wanna rely on somebody else because that's gas, that's money, you know? I would have to disclose my information 'cause they just wouldn't understand in the first place, so they would just keep asking.
I remember one of my roommates from sophomore year, there were two great ones, and one was, well she was something else. She was one of the biggest culture shocks I've ever received in my entire life. She came from a wealthy family. She never had to worry about any of that stuff, but she knew that I did. So she would come into my room and sit down and kind of interview me on what it was like to be poor. It was so tone-deaf that I was just like, "Wow, I can't believe this is what I'm experiencing right now." The tone-deafness gets to me sometimes. So I'm like, "These people just live in a whole new world."
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