Waqar Habib AP Lang/Comp -01st Sidle 09/14/2010

Adversity Mini Essay Adversity has a way of rousing talent from slumber, by stimulating and sharpening a person in ways prosperity cannot. In reference to The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, Hazel Lucas, a farm girl from the Dust Bowl era hated hardship and wanted only times of prosperity, but when the Dust Bowl struck her farm, she had to volunteer to work and teacher in her village school (41). This shows that she had to give up her dreams of people working for her and had to immediately react to the current situation in her village by teaching the little kids. This further explains the fact that she had to do every chore in the school to keep it running, from teaching to sweeping and building a fire so the children could learn new things, rather than worrying about the school system collapsing. Ike [Osteen] considered dropping out. There was supposed to be work on a government road job, paving a line across southern Baca County into New Mexicobut Ikes mother said it would break her heart if he left before making it out of high school[so] he signed up to help with the senior playas a stagehand (172). In this quote, Egan illustrates that in the 1930s and The Dust Bowl era, people had no motivation of getting a proper education at all, in fact they just looked for hiring posters around their village and very easily dropped out of school and worked a menial job, like Osteen ponders about working on a road project. This quote further explains that just because Osteens mother forced him to keep studying, he discovered his immaculate talents that he never knew he had, which links back to the fact that hard times provoke a person to look into themselves and search for hidden talents. Referring to chapter thirteen of the book, it is described how Jeanne Clarks sick mother had to leave Broadways bright lights and go to the High Plains, just to seek a medical treatment for her respiratory ailments, also for which she starved for a day-and-a-half (174). This quote proves that

Waqar Habib AP Lang/Comp -01st Sidle 09/14/2010

adversity forces a person to do anything that they had never ever imagined to do. In Clarks mothers case, she had to terminate her dancing career at Broadway, so she could go get herself fixed of all ailments and then take care of her kid and her husband. So, in the end it all comes together to one end that hard times force people to do stuff they never imagine they would do in their lives and it is adversity only that leads us to experience new things in our lives.