Nazu

At 10 years old Kaylie Hegwood told a camera what hunger feels like. "Sad and all droopy." When a cooking show came on TV, she said, she wanted to vanish into the screen and start eating the food. She lived in Stockton, Iowa, with her mom and her 12-year-old brother Tyler. Her mom had lost a factory job. The family was living on $320 a week in unemployment plus food stamps. Kaylie walked the railroad tracks looking for cans, 5 cents for a good one, 2 cents for a crushed one. In the video below she sits on a swing in the yard and talks about it the way you'd describe your school day. They don't get three meals. If there's cereal there's no milk, if there's milk there's no cereal. "Switch and swap." At 0:31 she explains her trick for when she's starving. She thinks of something else, and then she's not hungry anymore. At 1:07 she tells you what she's afraid of. "Me and my brother will starve." Then one of the dogs had to go. Nala was the one who slept on your bed. "We're getting rid of my perfect little lovey dog." Watch 1:22. At the shelter a worker asks if they want the leash and collar back, and you hear Kaylie. "Collar, Mom." They gave up the house and moved into a motel room with no fridge. "This sink is our fridge." They got a rented duplex and lost that too. By the end of filming she was out of school because they kept moving. She tried to work out why this had happened to her. "I think my mom, she kind of made a wrong turn or something." Then at 2:02 you hear what a 10-year-old thinks is coming. "If I keep missing school, then I see my future poor, on the streets, in a box." Filming began in 2011, in the richest country on earth. Kaylie did get back to school. The shelter said Nala went to a very nice family. FRONTLINE kept following her for 14 years, and in 2025 she was grown and expecting a child of her own. "Changing the cycle that you were born into is very hard." Was Kaylie failed by one wrong turn, or by a country where a dog collar can be the last thing a kid gets to keep?