On a self-directed road tour of poverty in America, photographer Aaron Huey stopped at the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota to observe the Lakota tribe. He knew the stats about poverty in the U.S., he told The New York Times in a recent interview, but he couldn't have expected the squalor he saw: walls covered in black mold, children eating food off floors. Emotionally devastated, he canceled the rest of the trip and spent the next five years documenting their plight, a story he calls "long, murky and loaded with pain."
But obscene as it may sound, that kind of purposeful emotional gut-punch—looking abject disadvantage in the face and coming out galvanized to fight it—is paradoxically a luxury for most. What if simply re-creating the logistical challenges of a deprived life were just as effective?
The Jewish Federation and Catholic Charities jointly tested that notion on a recent Tuesday evening. Gathering at Vanderbilt's Hillel Center, where a sleek assembly room was transformed into a bureaucratic slog, dozens of Vanderbilt students gave up a competitive TV night to participate in a poverty simulation re-creating the daily challenges of the economically marginalized. In Nashville, that's some 70,000 folks with incomes under $25,000, according to a September report on poverty by Metro Social Services.
Vandy students aren't just an exceptional academic group. They're also exceptionally unlikely to become poor. According to the report, being black, Hispanic or female, high school educated at most or under 18 finds you more likely to need assistance. That's where the simulation comes in.
Facilitator Patsy Watkins, who works with Williamson County Extension Services, says the re-enactment has long been used for welfare workers and volunteers who work in soup kitchens or food banks. Now it's increasingly being used to raise awareness for students and citizens at large. "It's a small thing, but we try to show folks how to walk a mile in their shoes," says Watkins.
More like an hour. Only that hour represents a month, and four 15-minute segments each represent a week of life. That week is filled with frustratingly insurmountable obstacles. Students begin the simulation assigned to a family—represented by four chairs with a family nametag taped to the back. They're given identity packets with despairing details and sent off to scramble around the room, where along the perimeter sits a variety of government agencies and their often infuriatingly unhelpful staff—all to get your kids to school, find work or take care of bills or health care.
Hint: It's a logistical black hole.
You might be a mother of three who earns only $300 a month at your part-time job at the hospital. But you can't afford daycare because you work only 20 hours a week. You can't get a better job because you have only a high school education. With no bank account, you must patronize a check-cashing place. The cost: a chunk of your income in fees. Food stamps help, but they won't pay rising gas and utilities costs or your elder son's dental costs. Your only transportation is the bus. Luckily, you have an old stereo in regular pawn-shop rotation as your only offering to the wolf at the door. Child support? If only.
So you try navigating a labyrinth of agencies—staffed by community volunteers who are instructed beforehand to be as polite or rude as they feel, and as honest or dishonest as they wish. The pawn shop, the utilities companies, the health department and welfare offices are all on hand, even a county jail with a police officer on duty who mainly functions as a truancy officer. And many of them take that offer of bureaucratic indifference to heart, displaying an eerie ability to mimic all the short, unhelpful gruffness you'd expect at the DMV. But the chaos-inducing key element is the requirement of transportation passes required at every stop. It's a way to mimic the difficulty that securing reliable transportation poses on nearly everyone in poverty.
"Transportation is always a problem in poverty," Watkins says. "There's no public transportation, or they don't have a car, or if they do, it's broken down or they don't have enough money for gas. They spend all their time going from agency to agency to agency to get help. And if you've never been to these government agencies, you have no idea how long it can take."
By the time you've cashed your check and negotiated a 30-percent interest loan, a week has passed, and you still haven't scored food stamps. In essence, the re-enactment is like playing the game of Life—only with an absurdly shoddy hand. With the cards so stacked against the participants, if this were an actual game, only masochists would buy it. A round of lottery tickets, anyone?
But that's the point. "When you're in poverty, tasks take more time just to survive," says Watkins.
Nashville's Social Services is addressing precisely that agency-navigating process, though public information representative Lisa Gallon admits it can be difficult because there is no one centralized location to take care of all your needs. "Yes, it can appear to be really daunting just to get at what you need," says Gallon, who has participated in a similar simulation herself.
The 211 line helps. It's a resource jointly offered by the United Way to pair those in need with the correct agency, and the majority who call need help with utility bills, with food stamps a close second. Perhaps surprisingly, some 18,000 Nashville families under the poverty line who are eligible for food stamps don't sign up for them. According to the Metro Social Services report, the number of eligible families who don't use food stamps is 31 percent higher than those who do—a sign that 211 isn't as well-known as it should be.
But it's also proof of poverty's changing face. Many are middle-class people facing job losses, new to navigating the system. Mortgage assistance requests have climbed 30 percent from last year alone. Still, accessing 211 requires a phone or a computer—which requires money, which requires a job, which requires training and education, which requires transportation.
Which explains another aspect of poverty—that it's relationship-driven. Watkins may not be able to impart the emotional despair or the social stigma that comes with being poor, but she can reach out on this level to her students, who sit freshly scrubbed in new clothes, the occasional string of pearls and an enviable range of name-brand denim and sneakers.
"You may say you have lots of relationships with friends—wonderful relationships," says Watkins. "It's true—you do in the middle class. But your life doesn't revolve around them as it does in poverty. In poverty, relationships are about who can help you. Cousin Joe up the street may have a car, so then he's important to you because he can help you get to work.... There may be a drug dealer down the street but he can help you get food, so you're not worried so much about the fact that he's a drug dealer, but that he can help you get food."
Middle-class folks enjoy the luxury of replacing relationships with achievement: Finishing high school and college is a given. Time and money usually exists for vacations, ballet classes, shopping to blow off steam. Dental visits don't wait until you're a teenager. "Shopping is not just something we do because we need clothes—it's a hobby," says Watkins, eliciting a low-key burst of muffled laughter.
Student Brad Sterling admits he's lived a comfortable life. Growing up in San Francisco, he attended a private Catholic school before moving to Nashville, where he's studying to become an orthopedic surgeon. "Going to Vanderbilt, you just don't get exposed to it," Sterling said of the conditions Watkins described. He'd worked in a soup kitchen before, but other than that, he had little interaction with those less privileged. But by night's end, Sterling had spent an hour trying to help get his little sister to school, and trying not to go hungry in spite of his family being robbed. "It was chaotic," he said, his eyes bleary.
In all, some 50 students participated in the seminar, and in the group discussion afterwards, they chatted about overwhelming frustration. Many had failed to request a receipt for paying the mortgage, and were subsequently billed twice. They couldn't pay, so they came home to their four chairs coldly overturned—the simulation's signal that you've been evicted. They felt there was nothing they could do about it.
"Last year, I evicted people," said retired IRS agent Minnie Horton, who'd volunteered as the mortgage collector. "People did not tend to challenge me. They seemed to feel powerless. If someone paid rent and I took a $20 and slid it under my deck and asked for another $20, they paid it again." Horton had experienced that sense of resigned defeat among taxpayers working as a tax collector, but she thought it was merely a reaction folks had to dealing with the IRS. "But now I know it wasn't," she said.
Elsewhere, students lamented the generally baffling experience of negotiating with so few resources. "There was no one to take care of my kids," said a baby-faced student in dismay. That experience also matches the statistics: Children are the majority of the victims of poverty, some two to three times more likely to experience it than any other group.
Still, organizers stressed at evening's end that the reality was far worse still than anything they'd experienced that night. For too many thousands of Nashville families, poverty is no role-playing exercise. The organizers knew the limits of the simulation going in.
"Listen, we're not going to going to get rid of poverty tonight," Watkins warned the students. "We're probably not going to change anything." Looking around at the overachievers with undoubtedly bright futures, that seemed partially true. "But we can become more aware, and therefore when our paths do cross with someone or there's a situation where we can make a difference, we can be helpful."
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