Life in the Projects exposed in Here There Are No ChildrenThe book There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz is a very hard but emotional book. This book is important to me because it really made me realize how lucky I am to live in a good and safe environment. In this powerful and moving book, journalist Alex Kotlowitz traces two years in the lives of ten-year-old Lafeyette and seven-year-old Pharoah Rivers as they struggle to beat the odds and grow up in one of Chicago's worst housing projects called Henry. Horner.Lafeyette and Pharoah live with their mother LaJoe. LaJoe also had three older children, LaShawn at age twenty-five being the eldest. She occasionally worked as a prostitute to support her drug addiction. The second eldest, nineteen-year-old Paul, had served time in Indiana prison for burglary. Terence, now seventeen, had started dealing drugs at the age of eleven and had been in and out of prison. LaJoe's youngest children were four-year-old triplets, Timothy, Tiffany and Tammie. All eight children had the same father, Paul, to whom LaJoe had been married for seventeen years. The two had long fallen out of love. He lived at home occasionally. The family's living conditions were horrible. They lived in a very small apartment that sometimes housed more than ten people. Because LaJoe was a very friendly and caring person, he took many children and adults "under his wing" and took care of them when they needed it. Some kids in the neighborhood even called her "mom." LaJoe didn't have the courage to turn his back on anyone who showed up at his door. All the apartments at the Henry Horner were falling apart, many of them empty. During the spring of 1989 inspections were taking place in the basements of the Henry Horner projects by the director, assistant director and maintenance superintendent. The reported conditions of the basements shocked me. It is estimated that around two thousand household appliances, refrigerators, kitchen cabinets, doors, stoves, grills, etc. they were in puddles of water rusting. The basement was heavily infested with roaches and fleas. Dead rodents were lying in storage areas. The stench and odor were unbearable. After much arguing, LaJoe was finally able to convince Chicago Housing Authority employees to clean the basement.