Summary Of Us And Them By David Sedaris

I have been around many foster kids, if are were around some of these kids you may notice some of them are a little different and have problems. Being around these kids and learning the hardships they have had to go through gives you a whole other perspective on how they act. In David Sedaris’s “Us and Them” we hear the author tell of neighbors he had as a child. In the passage he explains how he viewed them as being weird and different. Later his perspective changed after observing what the family did in their free time. Using my personal experiences, and the experiences of David Sedaris in “Us and Them” I can begin to imagine how other people's life experiences might make them different than I. In my personal experience I became more sympathetic towards these kids, in Sedaris’s passage the tension only rose as time went on.

Some foster children didn’t know how to talk, or had very little knowledge of the outside world. Learning the stories of these foster children and what they have had to go through gave me a whole new perspective on their lives. Stories varied from children having nobody to teach them a language or to communicate with, to children having very little contact with the outside world. Sedaris neighbors behavior seemed very unusual to him. Sedaris had began to observe his neighbors in an attempt to understand their behavior. He soon found that his neighbors didn’t worry about the outside world, and that they didn’t even have a TV. On page two Sedaris states, “Because they had no TV the Tomkeys were forced to talk during dinner. They had no idea how puny their lives were, and so they were not ashamed that a camera would have found them uninteresting.” Sedaris and I have in common that we both were unfamiliar with a group of people and as we found out more about them we began to understand why they acted the way they