D. was a single mother who worked three jobs to provide for her two children and aging mother. As she sat with her daughter in a doctor’s waiting room, her ex-boyfriend entered the office, walked up to her and fired two bullets, fatally wounding the 42 year old woman. She died in her 12 year old daughter’s arms. As they told their story to a local politician, the diminutive child spoke quietly about her worry that there wouldn’t be enough food for them to eat now that her mother was gone.
The Breadwinners Foundation was there to help. 42 year old T. was an office manager in Colorado, happily married and busy raising two adolescent boys. Plagued with health problems, she found herself in and out of the hospital in early 2003, losing weeks of her much needed income. She had been the family's principal breadwinner since her husband's layoff more than a year before. The country's economic downturn was profoundly impacting her husband's chances of finding a job...any job. When she fell into a diabetic coma and died a few months later, she left no life insurance and a grieving family on the brink of becoming homeless.
The Breadwinners Foundation was there to help. R. was a hardworking husband and father in his thirties. A world away from his birthplace, his young family in New York was now his whole world. Two years ago, his 4 year old and 6 year old watched him walk down the street to the corner deli. Part of his daily routine, it was a walk he looked forward to every day. He had no way of knowing it was the last time he would ever take that walk. He had no way of knowing that it would be the last memory his children would ever have of him. Shot while buying a cup of coffee, his murder was part of a spate of senseless, racially biased shootings of Hindu Indians. Worlds collided in one life-changing moment, leaving two children fatherless and a young wife to grapple with her grief and the startling reality that she did not have the money to bury her beloved husband.
The Breadwinners Foundation was there to help. |