By: Emily V
Florida, Grade: 8

It was the worst; all of our hard work had seemed as though a waste of time because it was all gone before our eyes. My family and I had worked from sunrise to sunset making sure all of are crops grew successfully. Our crops were our ways of living. It provided for our hunger, our cost of home, and our clothes. This provided for our kids` Christmas` and their birthdays. This is how we survived.
That is until one day, we were all out on the fields working hard for our crops to grow and the wind started to pick up, and it became very cold as if winter had come. The wind had caused the sand under our feet to blow in all of our faces blinding us of our duties to our crops. The dust and dirt grew into big black clouds surrounding us and I could hardly breathe because of this massive storm of dust. It felt as though I had a real bad asthma attack and eventually I had gotten one. Almost fainting my husband grabbed me into my house huffing and puffing I gave him a hug and made sure all my children were safe. When the storm had lightened up and we could see again, we looked up at our crops and all that we had suffered to make was now gone.
This made me think how we would pay for our home and what would we eat, for our neighbors had lost everything too. Everyone had already been struggling since everyone had elected Herbert Hoover as the president because he had made the stock market crash and caused us to lose our lifesavings. We only hoped that the storm would leave us and not come back so we might start another field of crops to help us with our expenses, but it never did leave and we had used up the food we had inside our homes. Concerned for my children and my husband I decided on a solution.
We would move up west to California where weather was better and we could grow more crops. So this is what we did and when my husband, daughter, son, and I arrived there we realized that it wasn’t just us who decided to move up here. There were about 12.5 billion others who had joined us, especially Mexicans. We wanted fields to work in so we would be able to survive, but so did everyone else. This was not easy for us because they decided to give us little pay for our hard work since there were many of us and they knew we would put up with it because the only way we could support our families was through them, but not everyone did put up with it, many of the Mexicans protested against it.
Most people blamed our president Herbert Hoover for his unwise, irresponsibleness toward his job. We hoped our newest president Franklin Delano Roosevelt would somehow help us with our problems better than Herbert Hoover who we believed to have first gotten us into this mess. He seemed to live up to our expectations so far because he had came up with a plan to help us get out of this mess called the “new deal”. The New Deal was a series of programs and economic reforms to provide jobs and help the American economy recover. This plan did help us to get out of this great depression even though our country did not completely recover until World War 2. So as you can see we had it rough during these times and eventually we had made it out of it through God’s help because I can’t imagine still living like that today.