Awareness.

I tutor a fourth grader once a week for a few hours. Husna and I often have interesting conversations and I actually learn a lot from her. She is very outspoken and curious about everything.
Yesterday as we were working on spelling words she asked me to define "homeless," as that was one of her words to use in a sentence. I told her it meant someone without a home and she looked at me like I was insane. She proceeded to ask me about people without homes. She had no idea that this concept existed and she didn't understand how people could be homeless. She said, "where do they come from? don't they have parents with houses?" It was so surprising to me that she had never heard of homelessness yet she lives in the city of Chicago where there are so many homeless people.
In my dialogue class recently we have been talking about injustice and solutions to problems in the city of Chicago. It is nearly impossible for one person to fix a problem, it takes action from powerful people to be able to actually solve a problem. Anyways, this conversation that I had with my tutoring student showed me that awareness is very important. If people are not aware then things will never change. Sometimes I think kids are way too sheltered, parents need to be teaching their children about the world around them.