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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Anna Colon, who has diabetes, has cared for grandson Steven Nieves, 17, since he was a baby.

Steven Nieves looked like a guerrilla fighter, walking through the Bronx in his Junior R.O.T.C. uniform. He stood proudly in a tilted black beret and perfectly shined boots as he explained the meaning of an achievement ribbon: He was one of a small group from Bronx Aerospace Academy High School chosen to fly a plane with a flight instructor in recognition of his academic achievement.

“I was the only one stuck in the cloud,” he said, pantomiming trouble with the controls. “There was turbulence.” Read more..

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Mamadou Diallo with his two-year-old son, Ibrahim, in their Bronx apartment. The family was put in financial peril because of thousands of dollars in erroneous utility bills.

When that first unexpectedly high Consolidated Edison bill — with a balance in the hundreds of dollars instead of the usual $70 — landed in Mamadou Diallo mailbox in the Bronx last year, he simply paid it.

 This week, experts from the Children’s Aid Society and the Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New York will be answering selected questions about foreclosure and the housing crisis.

The Diallo Family

 Nafissatou Kante with two of her children, Ibrahim, left, and Issagha.

Moussa, and Madany, 10, reading ion their bedroom

Then came the whopping bill from Cablevision, and mysterious demands from phone companies. And the Con Ed balance continued to grow, from $404 one month to $634 the next.

All he could think, he said, was that “something is wrong; someone is trying to steal my electricity.” Read more..

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A Bronx Family Struggles To Survive Financially & In Heath

“For now,” Ms. Santiago said.

“The mortgage company owns it,” her husband added.

“Right now,” Ms. Santiago, 48, said, “we’re practically out the door.”

Their two-family home, in the Bronx’s Little Italy, is sparsely furnished, with a folding table and chairs in the dining room. A picture taken on their wedding day hangs high on the wall.

The Santiagos have two sons at home, Timothy, 16, and Nicholas, 20; and twin granddaughters, Tiffanie and Stephanie Caprio, 14, whose mother is unable to care for them.

For 23 years, Mr. Santiago, 58, has worked at a Bronx car service as a manager and dispatcher. Until last summer, he was earning $635 a week.

They bought their house for $155,000 in 1998, using $20,000 in savings as a down payment. Their mortgage payments started at about $1,000 a month, but over the years, in the thrill of first-time homeownership, the Santiagos made some refinancing decisions they now regret. Their monthly payments swelled to $3,599, they said. The family was living paycheck to paycheck, but they were making it.

Then, last year, Mr. Santiago had a heart attack.

“It wasn’t a real big heart attack where I fell on the floor,” he said. “It was just a lot of chest pains that wouldn’t go away. I thought it was heartburn.”

On July 2, he drove himself to St. Barnabas Hospital.

Later that day, he was transferred by ambulance to Montefiore Medical Center. Three days later, he had surgery to unblock a clogged artery.

Recovery took almost four months, and during that time Mr. Santiago could not work. Ms. Santiago does not work: She has epilepsy, and her seizures are not well controlled by medication. She cares for her husband at home.

While he was hospitalized, Mr. Santiago learned that he had diabetes. He has a fear of needles, so his wife gives him his daily insulin injections, as he looks away.

“I tried letting him do it himself and he got upset,” she said. “He wouldn’t do it.”

The family income shrank to $340 a month in disability payments. The Santiagos soon exhausted their savings and fell behind on their mortgage payments and other bills.

Mr. Santiago returned to work at the end of October. By then, they owed about $14,000 in mortgage payments and had received a notice of foreclosure. Mr. Santiago is not strong enough to resume all of his previous duties, and now works four days a week as a dispatcher, earning $350.

Their monthly income is supplemented by $1,646 collected from two tenants who rent parts of the house. They also receive $772 in food stamps each month.

With Mr. Santiago back at work, they were able to resume making mortgage payments. For help with bills, they turned to the Children’s Aid Society, one of seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund.

In the fall, $1,388.51 in Neediest Cases money covered the family’s $910.82 Con Edison bill and a $477.69 water bill. “That was a great help because I didn’t have the money,” Mr. Santiago said.

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Yusef, left, and Muntu Waliyaya, Davion Smith and Sonia Gayle at their apartment in the Bronx.

Bronx Family Grateful For Educational & Home Furnishing Support

Sonia Gayle and her husband, Kubblla Waliyaya, want their teenage sons and their granddaughter to have one thing on their minds: getting an education.

“Knowledge is power,” Ms. Gayle, 56, said at the family’s home in the Bronx.

Everywhere in the living room are items to nurture young minds.

Self-help and educational books sit in a towering stack on the dining table next to the place mats with a map of the United States, meant to teach the children about geography.

On a wall, along with family photos, is a colorful handmade poster with the alphabet in upper and lower case, for her to practice with her granddaughter, Davion Smith, 6.

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