How New York City Saved My Life

F. Walwyn Jones's uplifting memoir relates how a Belizean immigrant's pursuit of the American Dream brings her a keen awareness of the needs of others. How New York City Saved My Life tells of the author arriving to a cold welcome from the woman who sponsored her entry into the United States. Her interaction with other New Yorkers, however, makes her optimistic about her future.

She is soon offered a job as a live-in companion for an elderly woman, which grants her independence from her sponsor. The author returns to Belize, marries her fiancé, and they return to New York to begin their quest for the American Dream. She eventually enters the corporate world as an assistant to high-powered executives and moves from a run-down Brooklyn tenement to purchasing a home in Queens, followed by a more elegant home on Long Island.

The author's employer relocates its offices to New Jersey, and she and her family relocate along with her employer. She becomes active in her community and church, and such involvement heightens her awareness of the many problems and needs of others. This motivates her to give of herself to others, transcending the limits of self-absorption. She therefore leaves the corporate world and becomes a foster/adoptive parent to abandoned, medically fragile infants and to author two spiritually based books. After several years, the author and her family relocate to California where she furthers her education, obtaining a bachelor's degree in sociology, a master's degree in social work, and pursues a doctorate in counseling. She also adopts two children.

Humorous and entertaining, yet insightful and profound, this memoir raises awareness to poignant cultural, social, and economic issuescomparing East Coast and West Coast. It also offers seminal illumination into issues of institutionalization and systemization run amok and the plight of the human condition when "group think" and Weberian Bureaucracy overshadow meeting the needs of the poor, the downtrodden, the infirm, and the vulnerable. A social worker, the author now lives in New York.

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