Gloria Garcia should not have made it this far.She said she was told by her first foster family that construction workers found her as a toddler, eating paint chips off the walls at an abandoned building where her mother had left her.
At 18, when she became pregnant, her final foster family threw her out. She then endured four years of brutality at the hands of a boyfriend whom Ms. Garcia described as a crack addict, before she fled with her daughter, Tatiana.
They spent the next three years hiding from him in a domestic violence shelter. And the first apartment she found after finally leaving the shelter system went up in flames months after she moved in.
But Ms. Garcia, 32, has emerged from all of this remarkably well adjusted, with a soft-spoken manner that masks an iron will. Asked how she managed to avoid the pitfalls of shelter existence — violence, drugs, apathy — she has a theory. “I’m a product of my environment, but I didn’t become my environment,” she said. Read more..
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