where is dasani from invisible child now where is dasani from invisible child now

Just a few blocks from townhouses that were worth millions of dollars. In 2013, the story of a young girl named Dasani Coates took up five front pages in The New York Times. Dasani would call it my spy pen. It comes loud and fast, with a staccato rhythm. Author Andrea Elliott followed Dasani and her family for nearly 10 years, Like, she was wearing Uggs at one point and a Patagonia fleece at another point. What she knows is that she has been blessed with perfect teeth. Dasani was in many ways a parent to her seven younger brothers and sisters. Shes tomorrows success, Im telling you right now.. Editor's note: This segment was rebroadcast on May 16, 2022. There were evictions. Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. "Invisible Child" follows the story of Dasani, a young homeless girl in New York City. In Fort Greene alone, in that first decade, we saw the portion of white residents jump up by 80%. Here in the neighbourhood, the homeless are the lowest caste, the outliers, the shelter boogies. Tweet us at the hashtag #WITHPod. The mice used to terrorise Dasani, leaving pellets and bite marks. Dasani landed at 39 Auburn Place more than two years ago. St. Patty's Day, green and white. And there was this, sort of, sudden public awakening around inequality. She hopes to slip by them all unseen. She makes do with what she has and covers what she lacks. And that's the sadness I found in watching what happened to their family as it disintegrated at the hands of these bigger forces. Theres nothing to be scared about.. She would change her diaper. Chris Hayes: Dasani is 11 years old. She had a drug (INAUDIBLE). Andrea Elliott: So at the end of the five days that it took for me to read the book to Dasani, when we got to the last line, she said, "That's the last line?" Now in her 20s, Dasani became the first in her immediate family to graduate high school, and she enrolled in classes at LaGuardia Community College. And that carries a huge ethical quandary because you don't know, "Will they come to regret this later on?" Elliott says those are the types of stories society tends to glorify because it allows us to say, if you work hard enough, if you are gifted enough, then you can beat this.. And I have this pen that's called live scribe and it records sound while I'm writing. A little sink drips and drips, sprouting mould from a rusted pipe. You know, we're very much in one another's lives. Laundry piled up. Whenever this happens, Dasani starts to count. Paired with photographs by colleague Ruth Fremson , it sparked direct action from incoming Mayor Bill DeBlasio, who had Dasani on the stage at his administrations inauguration in January 2014. A changing table for babies hangs off its hinge. Of all the distressing moments in Invisible Child, Andrea Elliotts book about Dasani Coates, the oldest of eight children growing up in a homeless shelter in New The other thing you asked about were the major turning points. I think it's so natural for an outsider to be shocked by the kind of conditions that Dasani was living in. First of all, I don't rely on my own memory. Chapter 42 Now a sophomore, Dasani believes that her family is desperately fractured. But I don't think it's enough to put all these kids through college. asani ticks through their faces, the girls from the projects who know where she lives. CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And now, we move to New York. Well, by the way, that really gets in the way of getting a job. And so I have seen my siblings struggle for decades with it and have periods of sobriety and then relapse. It wasn't a safe thing. Paired with photographs by colleague Ruth First of all, Dasani landed there in 2010 because her family had been forced out of their section eight rental in Staten Island. But I met her standing outside of that shelter. Dasani places the bottle in the microwave and presses a button. And I said, "Yes." In October of 2012, I was on the investigative desk of The New York Times. Web2 In an instant, she is midair, pulling and twisting acrobatically as the audience gasps at the might of this 12-year-old girl. Elliott writes that few children have both the depth of dishonest troubles and the height of her promise., But Dasanis story isnt about an extraordinary child who made it out of poverty. They follow media carefully. We often focus on the stories of children who make it out of tumultuous environments. Dasani Coates photographed in September last year. We just had all these meetings in the newsroom about what to do because the story was unfolding and it was gripping. She had a lot of issues. And that's just the truth. In this moving but occasionally flat narrative, Elliott follows Dasani for eight years, beginning in 2012 when she was 11 years old and living in And at first, she thrived. And I was trying to get him to agree to let me in for months at a time. We meet Dasani in 2012, when she is eleven years old and living with her parents, Chanel and Supreme, and I saw in Supreme and in Chanel a lot of the signs of someone who is self-medicating. Delivery charges may apply, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Now in her 20s, Dasani became the first in her immediate family to graduate high school, and she enrolled in classes at LaGuardia Community College. We meet Dasani in 2012, when she is eleven years old and living with her parents, Chanel and Supreme, and seven siblings in one of New York City's In 2019, when the school bell rang at the end of the day, more than 100,000 schoolchildren in New York City had no permanent home to return to. So she would talk about this. I never stopped reporting on her life. That's what we tend to think of the homeless as. And that's really true of the poor. Knife fights break out. She saw this ad in a glossy magazine while she was, I believe, at a medical clinic. Their sister is always first. And she tried to stay the path. Public assistance. She irons her clothes with a hair straightener. But because of the nature of how spread out Chicago was, the fact that this was not a moment of gentrification in the way that we think about it now, particularly in the, sort of, post-2000 comeback city era and then the post-financial crisis, that the kids in that story are not really cheek by jowl with all of the, kind of, wealth that is in Chicago. And demographers have studied this and I think that we still don't really know ultimately. Andrea has now written a book about Dasani. Toothbrushes, love letters, a dictionary, bicycles, an Xbox, birth certificates, Skippy peanut butter, underwear. And I was so struck by many things about her experience of growing up poor. Except for Baby Lee-Lee, who wails like a siren. It's something that I talked about a lot with Supreme and Chanel. They spend their days in school, their nights in the shelter. Dasani races back upstairs, handing her mother the bottle. But I know that I tried very, very hard at every step to make sure it felt as authentic as possible to her, because there's a lot of descriptions of how she's thinking about things. And then they tried to assert control. She has a delicate oval face and luminous eyes that watch everything, owl-like. Their voucher had expired. On mornings like this, she can see all the way past Brooklyn, over the rooftops and the projects and the shimmering East River. Legal Aid set up a trust for the family. Best to try to blend in while not caring when you dont. In the city, I mean, I have a 132 hours of audio recorded of all my reporting adventures. In 2012, there were 22,000 homeless children in New York City. I mean, I have a lot of deep familiarity with the struggle of substance abuse in my own family. We meet Dasani in 2012, when she is eleven years old and living with her parents, Chanel and Supreme, and Coca Cola had put it out a year earlier. And when she left, the family began to struggle, and for a variety of reasons, came under the scrutiny of the city's child protection agency. They snore with the pull of asthma near a gash in the wall spewing sawdust. This focus on language, this focus on speaking a certain way and dressing a certain way made her feel like her own family culture home was being rejected. We'd love to hear from you. And you got power out of fighting back on some level. To be poor in a rich city brings all kinds of ironies, perhaps none greater than this: the donated clothing is top shelf. She sees this bottled water called Dasani and it had just come out. Her sense of home has always been so profound even though she's homeless. Her city is paved over theirs. She was commuting from Harlem to her school in Brooklyn. As Dasani grows up, she must contend with them all. It wasn't just that she was this victim of the setting. Dasani opens a heavy metal door, stepping into the dark corridor. They felt that they had a better handle on my process by then. Chris Hayes speaks with Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist and author Andrea Elliott about her book, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope In An American City., Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope In An American City. Sometimes it'll say, like, "Happy birthday, Jay Z," or, you know. And at one level, it's like, "It's our ethical duty to tell stories honestly and forcefully and truthfully." It's now about one in seven. And it's the richest private school in America. It was really so sweet. What Hershey calls code switching, which is you switch between the norms, the linguistic codes, and behaviors of one place to another so that you can move within both worlds or many worlds. A movie has characters." It was this aspiration that was, like, so much a part of her character. Then the New York Times published Invisible Child, a series profiling a homeless girl named Dasani. Dasani's roots in Fort Greene go back for generations. She was just one of those kids who had so many gifts that it made her both promising in the sense of she could do anything with her life. This is the type of fact that she recites in a singsong, look-what-I-know way. And a lot of things then happen after that. To follow Dasani, as she comes of age, is also to follow her seven siblings. We could have a whole podcast about this one (LAUGH) issue. By the time most schoolchildren in New York City are waking up to go to school, Dasani had been working for probably two hours. So there were more than 22,000 children in homeless shelters at that time in the main system. She is sure the place is haunted. But at the end of the day, they are stronger than anything you throw at them. And for most of us, I would say, family is so important. Elliott first met Dasani, her parents and her siblings in Brooklyns Fort Greene neighborhood in 2012. She wanted to create this fortress, in a way. She has a full wardrobe provided to her. Thats a lot on my plate.. I mean, that is one of many issues. And her lips are stained with green lollipop. Either give up your public assistance and you can have this money or not. They can screech like alley cats, but no one is listening. Her stepfather's name is Supreme. Named after the bottled water that signaled Brooklyns gentrification, her story has been featured in five front pages of the New York Times. It was incredibly confusing as a human being to go from their world back into mine on the Upper West Side in my rental with my kids who didn't have to worry about roaches. They were in drug treatment programs for most of the time that I was with them, mostly just trying to stay sober and often succeeding at it. This week, an expansion of her reporting comes out within the pages of Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City.. What was striking to me was how little changed. She loves being first the first to be born, the first to go to school, the first to win a fight, the first to make the honour roll. Just the sound of it Dasani conjured another life. Andrea Elliott is a investigative reporter at The New York Times, (BACKGROUND MUSIC) a Pulitzer Prize winner. She sorts them like laundry. You never know with a book what its ultimate life will be in the minds of the people that you write about or a story for that matter. The other thing I would say is that we love the story of the kid who made it out. By the time, I would say, a lot of school kids were waking up, just waking up in New York City to go to school, Dasani had been working for two hours. It's something that I have wrestled with from the very beginning and continue to throughout. Chris Hayes: That is such a profound point about the structure of American life and the aspirations for it. This is a pivotal, pivotal decade for Brooklyn. This is usually the sound that breaks Dasanis trance, causing her to leave the window and fetch Lee-Lees bottle. She's transient." You have been subscribed to WBUR Today. And I don't think she could ever recover from that. (LAUGH) You know? But to Dasani, the shelter is far more than a random assignment. She could change diapers, pat for burps, check for fevers. But the family liked the series enough to let me continue following them. It doesn't have to be a roof over my head. They did not get the help that many upper middle class Americans would take for granted, whether it's therapy, whether it's medication, whether it's rehab. I read the book out to the girls. Elliott She would wake up. This is She wakes to the sound of breathing. The movies." Criminal justice. By Ryan Chittum. Children are not often the face of homelessness, but their stories are heartbreaking and sobering: childhoods denied spent in and out of shelters, growing up with absent parents and often raising themselves and their siblings. And there's so much to say about it. I have a lot of things to say.. (LAUGH), Chris Hayes: You know? And, of course, not. Chris Hayes: You know, the U.S., if you go back to de Tocqueville and before that, the Declaration and the founders, you know, they're very big (LAUGH) on civic equality. Ethical issues. And then I wanted to find a target in New York, a good focal point in New York. She lives in a house run by a married couple. They would look at them and say, "How could they have eight children? You find her outside this shelter. Right? PULITZER PRIZE WINNER - NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A "vivid and devastating" ( The New York Times ) portrait of an indomitable girl--from acclaimed journalist Andrea Elliott "From its first indelible pages to its rich and startling conclusion, Invisible Child had me, by turns, stricken, inspired, outraged, illuminated, in tears, and hungering Family wasn't an accident. And one of the striking elements of the story you tell is that that's not the case in the case of the title character of Dasani.