At 17 years old, Michael (not his real name) is very optimistic about his future and he has vowed to make himself an honest man and to be a real father to any children he might ever have, even though all of the odds seem to be stacked against him.
For starters, six months ago Michael was a resident of the New Opportunity Corps (NOC) and at present he lives in a very unstable home environment. If that were not enough, he has no contact with his parents and only sees one of his four siblings; he is unsure as to the location of the three others.
Michael’s life as he knew it was torn apart at a very early age when his mother and father separated and his mother decided that she would place her four older children in an orphanage and the youngest, who was a baby at the time, with a relative. The reason? According to Michael, his mother became a mule for drug traffickers.
