Yira M

Yira is twenty-two and the mother of three children. She was born in Puerto Rico and moved to Philadelphia with her parents and siblings when she was eight years old. Yira’s youngest daughter, Alani, was born eight weeks premature and has been in and out of the hospital since she was born a year and a half ago. Yira lives with relatives in a crowded home – ten people squeezed into three bedrooms—because the house she’d been living in burned down and she hasn’t yet been able to move to another. Yira cannot work because a brain injury when she was young has made learning difficult—she struggles to do simple math and cannot read English.