[Shakira] Begum is a proud housekeeper, and a generous hostess. It is only if you have lived with her for a few days and catch her anxiously counting slices of bread, or carefully diluting washing-up liquid in a small plastic pot by the sink, or boiling saucepans of hot water to heat deliberately shallow baths, that you slowly begin to understand the full extent of her daily struggle. Poverty manifests itself in small things.

For Begum, and 31,500 other asylum seekers, deprivation is a legal obligation. Forbidden to work, she is forced to live on state handouts. New legislation that came into force last week has frozen benefits for asylum-seeker lone parents at £42.16 per week, instead of increasing it in line with inflation to £44.35. Begum receives an extra £50 a week for her daughter Farzana. Under the same legislation, single asylum seekers aged over 25 have had their benefits cut to just £5 a day. No asylum seeker is allowed to supplement their income, no matter how long it takes the Home Office to process their claim. Begum and Farzana, have been waiting for three years for a decision to be made about their asylum claim. She lives in fear that any day she could receive a rejection letter and will be deported.

Sadder still is the heartbreaking requests of thirteen year old daughter Farzana, who is desperately trying to be seen as normal. After a school friend photographed pictures of her dilapidated home and spread them around school, Farzana only has other friends in similar positions come over to visit. She yearns for birthday gifts like an Ipod, in spite of her mother scraping to pay for groceries each week. Her youthful hopes seem almost cruel when contrasted with their stateless circumstances.

Farzana has been getting straight As in art, and wants to go on a school trip to Paris to see the galleries, but they can't afford it, and her ID card probably wouldn't get her past the border. "Mum says I can't go," says Farzana, "But maybe it will be OK if I just go in with everyone, you know? Maybe they won't notice."

Though their existence is bleak, Begum fled an abusive relationship and an increasingly oppressive religious culture in her native country of Bangladesh. In light of the past trauma experienced by her and her daughter, they are willing to wait for the British government to hopefully grant them citizenship. In the meantime, Begum attends community college and looks forward to a brighter future:

Begum's favourite day of the week is Friday. It is when she volunteers for the Women Asylum Seekers Together (Wast) charity. Unlike most organisations that campaign on asylum issues, it is led by female asylum seekers themselves. Begum helps run the meetings. In Wast's small, overcrowded room, this small, welfare-dependent mother is a leader, welcoming new mothers from Eritrea and the Ivory Coast, fetching them chairs and asking them questions. She has a reputation among the regulars as a mine of valuable information. She knows how much benefit you're entitled to, when markets offer the best deals, legal aid numbers and cheap bus routes. Despite this, she does sometimes go over budget. When she is ill and cannot cook, she gives her daughter money for more expensive ready-cooked food.

Watching Begum at Wast, it is clear that she is not just fighting for herself, or even just for herself and her daughter. "All of us women are a team," she says. "If I get my papers, I will keep coming back here. This is not just about me. This is about all asylum seekers. All of us together."

'We're All In This Together' [The Guardian]

(And Jenny is 23, Tracie worked at Bust for six years and all of us have had more internship, temp and freelance gigs than we could actually count before afternoon.) And I realized something: we could have written that book!

Anna worked for pennies at "Fashion Wire Daily" for ten weeks out of desperation and left when she found a job that paid twice as much, Jessica worked for a week at an upstart magazine called Cocktail, after leaving one of those "freelance" jobs that's really a staff job without any rights or benefits; when the week was over Cocktail laid her off and closed down operations. Dodai worked at Alloy.com for three days when her old company found it within their budget to hire her back launching a new project that then got abandoned. And my shortest gig turned out to be the longest!

I was working at the Washington Times, at a rate of $8 an hour, on the metro desk. I hated it, because all but one of my editors would rewrite my stories. The paper, which is owned by a Korean cult and almost hilariously conservative in editorial bent, was managed mostly by embittered refugees from the Washington Star, a newspaper that had folded like a hundred years earlier. Like most newspapers at the time, the Star had had unions. Unions were the reason it was basically impossible for me to get a full-time job at a real newspaper, and one of the reasons newspapers were dying, but time was you could have a non-union position at a company and they'd try to keep you around anyway. So anyhow, as you know, those days are over. Isn't there a fucking happy medium? Some of us would like to stop switching jobs.

Oh, and if you're wondering how that story ended, after five months I quit and got a Time Inc. internship that paid $700 a month, in Hong Kong, a city where the average rent at the time was about $1500 a month, and worked maniacally until they found a $24,000 staff position for me within their budget. I think they justified the low pay because Hong Kong income tax is more like sales tax in the United States. I left when a website doubled my salary, but when I returned to the New York and found, actually, media companies paid people pretty piss poor in the United States too.

What Do You Do? Depends On What Week It Is [New York Times]