Today is Blog Action Day 2008, and we are all supposed to blog about poverty.
I could join the lament on the appalling world statistics, and flagellate myself for being so rich, and caring so little for all these poor people in faraway lands. I could. What would it accomplish is the more important question?
Rather, I want to share the experience I had last year with Larissa, a nine year old girl who lives on the other side of the freeway. The other side is an euphemism for poor, crime-ridden, predominantly black and hispanic East Palo Alto, a town without sidewalks, and where I prefer to not venture at night. For a year, I was Larissa’s mentor. I had been warned to not set my hopes up too high. I wasn’t sure what that meant, and started dreaming about becoming Larissa’s second mom. Maybe we could even send her to college?
I did spend most of my Sundays with her. At first, six, seven hours at a time, going for walks, to the museum, the farmer’s market, the beach, shopping for shoes . . . Larissa was hungry for love and attention, and took everything I was willing to give her. She waited eagerly for our visits, and gave me the gift of her love, and her appreciation. I got involved with her school, far away in one of the wealthiest districts in our area, and soon started receiving emails from her teacher, asking me to help her with her homework. The only times I was willing and able to do so was during our Sunday times. I learned that Larissa had not done her homework for the last two years. Getting her to change became an uphill battle. Her mom was unwilling to help, and soon I felt, what’s the point? One day last Spring, Larissa announced that her mom was pregnant with her fifth child. The mom could hardly take care of her four children with three different fathers, all absent, and now she was about to have another one with a fourth father. This didn’t make sense to me. I shared Larissa’s excitement and kept my outrage to myself. With summer coming, I felt Larissa needed some times away from her crowded home, and a chance to play, and be in the outdoors. I signed her up for a one week away camp with the YMCA. She said her mom had plans to send her to another camp, and also to a day camp at the YMCA. I dropped Larissa off at the bus for her camp, and took off for my trip to Europe. When I came back three weeks later, I could not reach her. This had been a consistent problem, with her mom changing phone numbers every few weeks, and also moving from house to house several times in the course of the year. We were able to reconnect later in the summer. Her mom had lost the papers for the other camp, and had not bothered to walk over to the local YMCA to register her for her day camp. I felt mad at her mom, for not taking these simple steps. Mad at the situation, for creating a culture of helplessness, and of fatherless children. Mad at a society, that’s making it almost impossible for a bright child like Larissa, to succeed. Since we met a year ago, Larissa’s gotten fat, and barely fits in size 8 adult clothes. There are no good grocery stores where she lives. She and her family live on white bread, peanut butter, junky cereals, and noodles. Their only access to food is a neighborhood store that’s overpriced, and poor in fruit and vegetable. Larissa has had her share of funerals. Her eighteen year old uncle got shot, and his body was found in the trunk of a burnt car. Her baby cousin died. That’s life in East Palo Alto.
Most difficult has been to witness my increasing discouragement, as time went on. The agency that matched us congratulated us for making it past the one year mark. Most mentors drop out after a few months. Still, I started with high hopes, and vision of a lifelong friendship. Now, I keep in touch, but my enthusiasm is gone. I found that it is hard to fight an entire system.
La Marguerite 
A very very very nice post Marguerite. Congratulations for your efforts in helping this child. 🙂
Effing system… It is appalling to see such situations in what we call developed or rich countries.
I did a post on this topic too, mine summing up my previous articles on this matter : http://www.elrst.com/2008/10/15/blog-action-day-a-post-on-poverty/
This reminds me of my brother’s now ex-girlfriend, Audrey. She was tall, and beautiful, and very, very sweet, and had she grown up under different circumstances, she probably would have been successful, or at least been able to pursue her interest in acting and modeling. Unfortunately, she grew up in one of the seedier areas of Oakland, CA, sharing a house with her parents, siblings, aunt, and grandmother. (She actually had to share a bed with her grandmother, which was probably the main reason she was always at our house by 8AM during the summer.) Of course, the irony is that not one of those family members ever really encouraged her to focus in school or showed her the kind of love and affection that all teenagers so desperately need (whether they know it or not).
Anyway, Audrey and my brother eventually broke up for whatever reason, and the last that I heard, she had dropped out of school and been seen collecting cans and bottles from around the neighborhood.
So I agree: it’s hard not to feel disheartened when there are so many forces working against so many people, and particularly against children who have few options for improving their lives.
Thanks for a great post.
You would have loved my old friend Steve Cisler who made working with the unconnected (to healthcare, jobs, dreams …) one of his passions. He was probably the first librarian of the Internet. Sadly he was taken by cancer earlier this year.
In 2004 he spent a good deal of time mostly traveling the border between Mexico and the US without net in an attempt to see how change was coming (or not) to so many people. He would send me a memory card every few weeks and I would post it on a special blog.
http://tingilinde.typepad.com/unconnected/
It is discouraging, isn’t it? And then you have the privilege to choose the distance you’ll keep, and (for me at least) that induces a kind of paralyzing survivor’s guilt, made worse by the praise from middle-class people who aren’t doing as much…
That’s one springboard into activism; you can work your whole life on an individual basis and wear yourself out for nothing much, just like the people you’re trying to be in solidarity with. Or you can get organized and put in half as much effort and a bunch of other people put in small amounts of effort and fewer people burn out and more gets accomplished.
Though the small personal victories are more emotionally rewarding than the small structural ones, when they happen.
I bet your patience will find it’s way later into Larrissa’s heart and mind – you are exampling much more that you know – she may be part of a different system, and you may feel like the fight is with that system, at her expense – yet by being a constant you are giving. It doesn’t always have to be tangible
I think Rosa has the right of it. This is why we have community organisations and charities, so that it’s not all down to one person, you can spread yourself around and take more satisfaction from the small victories, being more philosophical about the defeats. That’s why children have two parents and some aunties and uncles, it’s why a teacher has a class of students and not just one.
It’s also true that you may be remembered by the girl and an inspiration to her. Many of us have teachers or friends in our past who strongly shaped our lives for good, and it’s rare that they even know.
Location, location, you’ve heard the real estate motto.
Your real estate was located in prime areas, from France to California, you have carried a proud culture and curiosity.
From the other side of the field, a different culture has fostered the helplessness which you have witnessed, and i will read this post over and over to trace my own.
Poverty is a state of societal disgrace, not of finance, this one example showed you that happiness is an opportunity, how many ever have the patience to offer that much?
Until children are empowered by an adequate education, there will not be a solid society. The syndrome bleeds across economic lines, many feel abandoned and worthless, even amid materialistic abundance.
Compassion and mental resources can equip anyone to cope with abject situations, i believe that you have made an indelible mark which will sustain at least one person; and she will carry that further in later years.
Education, education, who will educate the parents? enforced parental classes, anyone?
I’m not sure that it’s education, greenadine. It’s more just the Give A Shit Factor. Some people just don’t, they drift through life simply avoiding paying bills, sleeping with people without contraception, eating whatever’s easiest, buying what they want when they want it, and so on. They just don’t care.
It’s not lack of knowledge, nine times out of ten. It’s that they don’t care. I mean, if knowledge were all that mattered, nobody would smoke, drink to excess, leave lights on, have unprotected sex, and so on. A lot of people just don’t give a shit.
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Kiashu, i’ve found that often the people who look like they just don’t care are heavily emotionally damaged. Depression, anxiety attacks, self-medication for untreated mental illness, PTSD, the effects of past physical abuse, carrying more responsibility than you’re able to fulfill from an early age…that flat lack of affect while doing self-destructive things usually have a cause.
And then, the constant stress of being treated as a low-status person is wearing just by itself. There’s some good research on the group level of the stress effects of racism and poverty, and there is very good research on the effects on individuals of being treated with contempt.
Since we are right in the midst of a heated election, I would like to add some encouraging news from the Obama camp, on the poverty front:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/13/barack-obamas-innovative_n_134162.html
Certainly, Rosa, many of those who don’t care have good reasons for being that way. My point was that education doesn’t change that.
Knowledge + willpower —> action
greenadine thought that only knowledge was lacking. I say that it’s rare that knowledge is lacking, that willpower is more often lacking.
Improving people’s knowledge helps not at all if they have no willpower to act on it. It’s not like people just don’t know that being illiterate, taking drugs and sleeping with random strangers unprotected is bad for them.
Whereas if people’s willpower improves, they’ll find the knowledge themselves. “I want to do X, but don’t know how. I’ll find out.”
Some years ago I was working a little cafe, it was open seven days so we needed three full-time chef/cooks in all. At one point we were hiring the third, we had two applicants right away. One was an experienced girl, the first thing she asked about was leave, and wanted to restrict her hours and so on, and anyway this was just a part-time job, she wanted something else for her career; the second was an inexperienced guy who was very keen and wanted to be a chef as his career.
The boss said we should take the girl, I said we should take the boy. “But he doesn’t know anything.”
“Better a good attitude and knows nothing than a bad attitude and knows lots. We can teach an ignorant but willing person, but a lazy person will always be lazy.”
“I don’t have time to teach anyone!”
“I do. I’ll teach him.”
“No, you’re wrong.”
They hired the girl, and a week later she took two weeks off. So then they hired the boy, and he stayed and worked hard and learned quickly and was an excellent employee.
Obviously hiring people for a job is a different thing to people living their lives generally. But my point remains that attitude is more important than knowledge. Bad attitude makes all knowledge or ignorance irrelevant; good attitude can get the knowledge, and make good use of the knowledge once it’s got.
As to why people have good or bad attitudes, and how we can change them, that’s what marguerite’s blog is about. I don’t care too much, it interests me a bit but I’m more interested in speaking to those with a good attitude, there are enough of them to get us the social, economic and environmental changes we need. Majorities change nothing, it’s small angry groups who change society.
thank you for the kind comment over at my blog, Marguerite, and for sharing your experiences. keep fighting the system, with one good action at a time.
ah? by education, i did not mean the technical aspects of, but rather the emotional empowerment of it.
when a person is given the mental resources to assess and deal with life situations, that individual may rise above conditions of poverty and self destructive behavior.
one good action, sustained care and attention will help over time. but it takes much patience from everyone involved.
two people two dozen years:
one talented self destructive/addictive depressed/anti-social.
one talented resourceful co-depressed, perennially hopeful
one self medicates lives as no tomorrow no today.
one works and repairs as if no yesterday only tomorrow.
difference:
one from long line of wishful poor with parasitic coping.
one from educated base, self denying with stoic mechanism.
education may serve as a pool of practicality which will strengthen an individual, protect emotions and perceptions. but it may not guarantee the wisdom of choices.
rosa said it well.
Recognizing that what is responsible for poverty is human arrogance, greed and shameful behavior.
Our lexicon of business activities is being expanded daily, thanks to the “wonder boys” on Wall Street. We are learning about derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, recapitalization, puts, short selling and so on. We are gaining a new vocabulary from the recent meltdown of the financial system and expected slowdown of the real economy worldwide.
Where did this debacle begin? Well, it began in the center of human community’s banking and investment houses in the financial district of NYC. Supposedly, the “brightest and best” among us go to Wall Street, know what they are doing and do the right thing. Unfortunately, such assumptions turn out to be colossal mistakes.
How did this calamity occur and why is the human family in such dire economic straits? It appears that grotesque greed and a culture of corruption have come to dominate significant operating systems of the global political economy.
Powerful people in high offices within huge business institutions with access to great wealth are recklessly and deleteriously manipulating the unbridled expansion of the global economy in the small, finite planetary home God blesses us to inhabit.
Self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe have surreptitiously “manufactured” a sub prime “asset bubble” and perversely fostered its uneconomic growth within the world economy. Not unexpectedly, this asset bubble did what bubbles do. The sub prime bubble burst and made a mess. Global credit markets have frozen, stock prices are tumbling and the value of the dollar is gyrating.
Evidently organizers, managers and whiz kids overseeing the global economy, and the unraveling {ie, deleveraging} of the worldwide sub prime swindle, are running the artificially designed financial system of the global economy as a pyramid scheme. This is to say that the international financial system is being operated so that most of the wealth funneled pyramidally into the hands of a small minority of people at the top of the world economy where this wealth is accumulated and consolidated. Note that thirty percent of annual corporate profits end up in the accounts of a tiny number of people. At the same time, the vast majority of people on Earth, near the bottom of the global economic pyramid, are left with very little wealth. Does the economy of the family of humanity exist primarily to provide wealth to the already stupendously wealthy? The “bankstas” among us evidently think so.
In the 1980s, this extremely inequitable method of distributing wealth and arranging business activities was called a “trickle down” economy. We have been repeatedly told how this ‘rational’ economic scheme is good because it “raises all ships.” And yet, from my limited scope of observation, the billion people living on resources valued at less than one dollar per day and the additional 2.7 billion people being sustained on two dollars per day of resources now appear to be stuck in squalid conditions. The ‘ships’ carrying these billions of less fortunate people
Thanks are due La Marguerite and everyone else for what is being communicated in La Marguerite’s Blog. At least to me, this work is vital.
La Marguerite, you are an honorable person. You neither hide nor are you willing to hide from empirical evidence. We need your example displayed in the actions of many other leaders who presently seem to be unwilling to communicate openly certain understandings about what is real and true to them. The science of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth is a case in point.
So far as I can tell, your work is helping people to see more clearly as it is the wondrous world we inhabit and to more deeply appreciate the miraculous beings that humans are.
Of course, your reporting is occasionally off-putting precisely because the message from science that you bring us is apparently unforeseen, distinctly discomforting and most unwelcome.
Reports of good science, when that science is new, is routinely difficult to acknowledge, much less address. But that is what we are called upon to do. Grasping good science and adjusting to whatsoever could be real is required of us, I suppose. If today’s leaders intend to provide a good enough future for our children, then nothing other than productive adaptation to the requirements of reality will do. It appears that the human community could soon have genuine, human-driven, global challenges to overcome.
Despite all the efforts of denialists and naysayers, leadership has responsibilities to assume and duties to perform, just as you are doing, by urging the family of humanity to open our eyes and see what looms ominously before us on the far horizon. By willfully avoiding scientific evidence, we are losing the exquisite value found in one of God’s gifts to humanity as well as threatening the wellbeing of our children, life as we know it and Earth.
Remaining electively mute in the face of good science related to the human overpopulation of Earth, the reckless dissipation of natural resources and the wanton degradation of the environment cannot be allowed to prevail. Even though reasonable and sensible scientific evidence comes into conflict with what our culture validates as real and true, still the evidence has to be carefully examined…. and not ignored. Is it possible that the standard for determining what is real and true in our culture is too often this: whatsoever is widely shared, consensually validated and judged to be economically expedient, politically convenient, socially agreeable is true and real? In that case, much of the scientific evidence found in this splendid blog presents many too many leaders and opinion makers in our culture with evidence of inconvenient truths.
Each culture presents its membership with much that is real and also much less that is illusory. From the standpoint of a psychologist, because humans are shaped early and pervasively by cultural transmissions in our perception of reality, it looks like an evolutionary challenge for humankind to see the world as it is.
It appears that cultural transmissions or memes generated within a culture may at times mesmerize human beings in that widely shared and closely held memes occasionally “produce” illusions of the world as it is. Some research seems to disturb us in basic ways because this scientific evidence comes into conflict with certain ideologically/culturally derived notions that are adamantly held by leaders about what it means to be human and about the “placement” of humankind within the natural order of living things. Unexpected scientific evidence of this particular kind is uniformly difficult for people to see, I suppose, because such evidence undercuts the ‘pedestal’ from which human beings prefer to hubristically look upon other living creatures and nature. We humans may introject biased and empiricially unsupportable cultural transmissions that confuse human reasoning and promote a certain cortical conceitedness which is not helpful when trying to see what is real. For a long time certain illusory memes appear to have been passed from generation to generation, distorting human perceptions and making it difficult for the human family to see scientific evidence for what is real about it.
La Marguerite, with your leadership and assistance, perhaps we will come to more fully appreciate the difference between specious illusions borne of ideological/cultural bias and evidence derived from the careful, skillful and rigorous deployment of science.
hy, Give something for help the hungry people in Africa and India,
I created this blog about that subject:
on http://tinyurl.com/65dptv