Short Story: The House On 93 Little Hobart Street

The house on 93 Little Hobart Street is a small, broken down home to a family of six. The steps leading to the front deck have holes in them and look dangerous for the smaller child to walk on. There is no working electricity or plumbing, with holes in the roof, making the entire house freezing cold at night. Four children live in this house with both parents, still married. The youngest of them is Maureen who is eight years old, Brian, the second youngest, is twelve, Jeannette is thirteen, and Lori, the oldest, is sixteen. All of the children have raggedy, worn-down clothing, with crazy, nappy hair. They all are extremely thin due to the lack of food in the house, and seem to not have bathed in an extended amount of time. Jeannette Walls was the first to be interviewed out of the children and claims that the family has many problems with obtaining and keeping money. Over the summer she had been given two-hundred dollars, which should have been enough to support her father, brother, and herself, until her father started asking for money to buy alcohol. She ended up having to get a job to
In a few words, Lori basically had the same comments as the rest of her siblings, but she had one story that stuck out. She says that as a child she was stung by a scorpion and should have been taken to a hospital, but instead she was taken to a witch doctor (Walls 12). This doctor cut open her wound, put some sort of mystery substance in it, and chanted words in another language. This, once again, is another example of the safety needs of these children being unprovided (Maslow’s eight stage hierarchy of needs). In another instance, Jeannette was about three and cooking hotdogs with no supervision, and she ended up on fire and being seriously burnt. This time the child was taken to a hospital and left with only a few scars, but Lori believes this situation could have been avoided if a parent was watching