Disease

As a child, I grew up in a home with a mother suffering from mental illness. While not a physical disease, this illness could cause lack of physical motivation and practically immobilize someone for days (or longer). As the youngest of five children, and the closest to our mother, I always took it extremely hard when she started to display her warning signs and eventually decide to get the help that she needed in hospitals.

I leaned on my siblings quite a bit when this illness crept up on our mother as She was unable to take care of herself, let alone all of us at particularly bad times. Our father always stepped up and took over with everything when she became ill and he was the backbone of our family for so many years. I also had a couple of friends that I could stay with when things at home got difficult and I needed a distraction and their families were always amazing about letting me join them whenever my mother was having a tough time.

El Salvador is a country in Central America where many of my students migrate from. In El Salvador in 2014, 31.8% of people were living in poverty (The World Bank, n.d.). While Poverty is a big stressor for children, natural events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, droughts, and even volcanic eruptions, causes loss of life as well as property. When these natural events occur, funds from public and social services are taken to help with emergency relief. This means that schools and other services that help children and families are the ones that suffer first. To help prevent this from happening in the future, The El Salvador Disaster Risk Management Development Policy Loan (DPL) was designed by the Salvadoran government and the World Bank. Hopefully, with this loan in place, funds will not be taken from those services that help children and families and will instead give El Salvador the funds they need immediately after a natural disaster.

References

The World Bank. (2015.). Better Disaster Risk Management for El Salvador. Retrieved from http://www.worldbank.org/en/results/2015/09/22/better-disaster-risk-management-for-el-salvador

The World Bank. (n.d.) El Salvador. Retried February 4, 2017 from http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/elsalvador

The World Bank. (n.d.). Overview. Retrieved February 4, 2017 from http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/elsalvador/overview