It was just one of those days when every thing seemed to go wrong for Mattias. Except, things were even worse this time. Mattias at the age of only eleven was watching his mother die from the AIDS virus that he heard of and saw posters for all over the slums. He wondered what he would do now. His mother, the one he went to work with to stay away from the gangs and their recruitment programs, the one he loved more than anything, the one that had made sure he wouldn’t die hungry, was dying. 

She slowly closed her eyes and went into a coughing fit. But they came out as only sighs. The immune system had been attacked and defeated by many different ailments and the one that was destroying her lungs made it impossible to even make a real cough. She stopped the pathetic coughs now and looked once more into her son’s watering eyes and died. 

In the moment of her death Mattias felt more alone than he ever had in his whole entire life. He slowly stood up and ran from the cardboard and plywood shack they lived in. He ran for his life. He ran from the death in his horrible little shack, he ran from the horror of what he had just seen, he ran from the gangs he knew that would be coming to him making him join. He ran until he couldn’t breathe. 

He crumpled to the ground next to a over flowing dumpster and started crying. He noticed that he wasn’t even out of the slum that he lived in. He hated it here. He wanted to leave forever. But he was rational even in his grief. He knew that their was almost no chance of that. 

It was starting to get dark and he knew then he wouldn’t ever be going back to that shack. He curled up in a ball and sobbed once more and then drifted into sleep. 

With in a few years he was associated with one of the biggest gangs in the slum. He had been shot four times. Twice in the chest, once in the leg, and another time in the foot. He lived through all of them. He was one of the oldest in his gang. He was a leader. He was confident, smart, cunning, but different from any other of the gang members and it was noticed. He was one of the few in his gang that knew how to read and the only one that actually read for enjoyment. He knew it made him smarter, and he read everything he could get his hands on.