2nd Trash blog

One essential question that I came up with Trash, by Andy Mulligan, is that what was the significance of having the suitcase and why is the police trying to hunt it down? As I kept reading more into the novel, I then realized, the importance of the bag. The suitcase lead the three boys (Raphael, Gardo, Rat) to find a locker key with a code. This code leads to six million dollars, it was stolen by the vice-president. The police find out and they ask some question about the bag to Raphael, but he doesn't cooperate.

Both the article and book are about child property. In the article “Child poverty in the U.S. is among the worst in the developed world”, by Christopher Ingraham, he talks about the child property rates in the US. In the article it explains that, “Nearly one third of U.S. children live in households with an income below 60 percent of the national median income in 2008 - about $31,000 annually. In the richest nation in the world, one in three kids live in poverty. Let that sink in… With 32.2 percent of children living below this line, the U.S. ranks 36th out of the 41 wealthy countries included in the UNICEF report. By contrast, only 5.3 percent of Norwegian kids currently meet this definition of poverty.” Then the it says, “ More alarmingly, the share of U.S. children living in poverty has actually increased by 2 percentage points since 2008. Overall, 24.2 million U.S. children were living in poverty in 2012, reflecting an increase of 1.7 million children since 2008.” Both of these quotes explain a lot about the United States of America, it shows that we are barely doing anything to help these kids.
        Trash, has many people talking about the story. Raphael talks about his city(Behala), “... there’s a lot of things hard to come by in our sweet city, and one of the things too many people don't have is toilets and running water. So when they have to go, they do it where they can” (1). This quote is from Olivia, “ The Behala children are beautiful, and to see them on the rubbish tips all day can break your heart. If you come to this country, do the tourist things. But come to Behala too and see the mountains of trash, and the children who pick over them. It is a thing to change your life” (84). Both of these quotes explain explicitly about the city of Behala.  But the government system is really broke.

Mulligan, Andy. Trash. London: Definitions, 2015. Print.