My life in East St. Louis

I live in East St. Louis in a small house with many broken windows and share a room with my three brothers. We all are a little crowded in that tiny room, and we always fight over the blanket we have to sleep with at night. Half the time my mother is not there and we have to try and find food to eat. It scares me when my mom goes out and we do not know where she is or when she will be home, there are many street fights outside of my house and it makes me worry if my mother is okay. My mom always told us never to go outside in the dark, because she said that the bad people are out at night. The tons of garbage in our backyard smell so horrid but there is no garbage pickup so we have nothing else to do with it, we just have to bare the smell.
A couple weeks ago, my dad was shot in a drive-by shooting, so now my mother has to try and support us on her own. She cried for days, and the police have still yet to care or even attempt to find the shooter. We really do not have much law enforcement in our town; everything is run down. When I look over into the city of St. Louis it makes me dream to get out of here someday soon, but it is nearly impossible to escape this place I call home.
Today is what I believe to be Tuesday, well it might be Friday, I do not really know. I am currently in fourth grade and my teachers name is Mrs. Smith. I went to school today excited, knowing that today was a day for my favorite subject, which is biology. Today we were learning about bacteria; however I do not have any idea what some bacteria looks like because we have no books or a microscope to examine a sample. Then I was told that Mrs. Smith would no longer be our teacher anymore and that we would be getting a new teacher tomorrow, our tenth new teacher. I do not attend school often because sometimes my mother needs me to stay home and watch my younger siblings while she goes out and does whatever she does, I have no idea what she really does or where she is. I love learning and being able to learn new things, however with our school I do not really know how to read to well or even tell what time it is. I want to be able to read and write well so I can get out of this town and start a better life; however, that is a hard task at hand. Reading signs and some words in church, which is about all I know, I really do not have a big vocabulary because my parents never had time to teach me, nor have ever tried.