Jamie Mustard

You're going to go in and you're wearing like a space suit and you're going to save the planet.

But after doing it for weeks, it became a torture.

And then I would fall asleep in there.

You would think it couldn't get worse than that.

And then they would kind of leave me alone and I'd be taking care of my brother.

And then I would get to be eight and a half.

And this is at a time where my mother, she would disappear for years at a time to go train, to be a machine counselor.

And then they said, they came over one day to the dormitories and they said, we need you to work on a project over at the main building and bring me up to a higher floor.

And I walk in and I see something I've never seen before.

I see all these rooms stripped down to the studs in the old hospital.

And I see this kind of brown paper.

And under the brown paper, there's tufts of stuff that looks like cotton candy.

And they give me kitchen gloves.

And they tell me that I'm going to be putting the cotton candy, what's called fiberglass, with just kitchen gloves and not even a mask into large industrial trash bags.

And there were hundreds of these by the time we were done.

And I would fill them up all day.

By the time I was done, I quickly realized that I would have fiberglass in my mouth, my throat, and all over my eight-year-old body.

And at that point, there were five of us living in like a tiny 100-square-foot studio apartment.

My little brother and my stepfather, my mother slept on the bed.

My older brother slept in the kitchen or the kitchenette.