These Broken Eyes

Every morning millions of teens across the world wake up to get ready for the day ahead of them. Some kids get ready for school and some kids get ready to go to work to help their family with payments.

I have realized that not all is what it seems. We teenagers who live in America seem to take everything for granted and problems such as not recieving our daily cup of coffee is a major problem in our everyday lives. We live everyday thinking everything is fine and our life will be fine in the end even if we don’t work. As much as that would be nice, we don’t seem to understand how severe the consequences can be and how lucky we are. From my personal experiences, most of the young adolescents in America take everything for granted. We take our school system for granted and think grades don’t really matter because after all grades don’t determine a person’s character? Wrong.

While a teenager here in America is lazing around and sitting in a classroom secretly texting their friends and hiding their phones behind their classmates during tests to get answers, there’s a kid across the world who wishes he or she could attend school in hopes of having a better life. The two months I spent in my hometown of Dhaka, Bangladesh opened my eyes. The moment you leave the comfort of your house you see trash filled roads and homeless people either begging for money in hope of getting enough to feed themselves or either searching for a job. You see, its because my eyes have been stripped of my innocence that I have just realized how much of our todays generation is in shambles and how we perceive things are completely out of order. For example, teenage girls in Bangladesh start working long hours in factories just to help with the rent.

Any amount of money recieved a month hardly goes to help he or she, but to help her family. I hear of many stories of how girls my age wish to receive a proper education. Some girls hope to become doctors and lawyers, but going to school for them isn’t easy as we teenagers in America do. Now, American teenagers from my view are lazy and throw a random fit of outrage just because it’s raining on the day they had to go to a party, nail polish chipped, and not going shopping on a daily basis. People these days get the perception that life will be fine, but little do they know that when they are throwing a fit about not getting enough chicken nuggets, there is a child in Africa and in the Middle East who is working countless hours to sustain their families as well as themselves.