Poverty Simulation

Poverty Simulation

I walked in and was handed a name card the read “Yomelda Yarrow.”  I sat down and met my husband, “Yuri Yarow”, who was in fact my coworker Elizabeth.  We were sitting in two chairs facing each other constituting our house for the next hour.  50 other people were being assigned an alias for the simulation, sitting in home groups around the room.   Elizabeth/Yuri and I picked up the baby dolls on our pile of information and started orienting ourselves with our situation.  We discovered that I had a job but limited English skills, Yuri received a social security check, and found the babies were our grandchildren that we had to care for (due to their mother being incarcerated for drug use).  Before we began the simulation, we were introduced to the agencies represented around the room, which we would have to interact with to survive the simulation. These included: jail, police, pawn shop, quick check cashing, mortgage company, Job and Family Services, school, grocery, bank, an interfaith organization, Community Action, and an employer.   We set off to navigate a month in poverty for the next hour, with each of the next 15 minute periods representing one week.

Anecdote Summary

The first week we were able to buy food, but I forgot my grandkids kids at school.  I chased down child services, panicked after they confiscated the grandkids, trying to explain that I just got off work.   I was in line for groceries, and I was simply late to pick them up, not neglectful.  Panic is actually pretty good word to describe the entire hour (ahem, month).    The child services worker had sympathy on me as I was speaking in broken English, due to my limited language skills.  Luckily in this situation, this incapacity helped.  30 seconds earlier, while purchasing food, the cashier noticed I couldn’t speak English well and short changed me.  I’m not good at English, but I’m not dumb.  I had to demand the correct change of “40 dollars!” three times until she laid down the correct change amount for my purchases.   Most other families weren’t so diligent, and they got ripped off everywhere from the pawn shop to the check cash place.  My family was lucky enough to have a bank account, so we didn’t have to deal with the quick cash venue.  

Even knowing the assistance system, as someone who works for the Benefit Bank, and having a basis for where to get things (utility help from community action, clothing vouchers from Interfaith), we still couldn’t make it.   Some families in the simulation (and in real life, of course) are constantly fighting the tide.  Trying to claw their way back to the top.  It was almost just as bad hovering on the edge of not making it.  There is a constant panic, a constant fear of being evicted.  One little thing could go wrong and throw the entire survival system out the window.  And I use the word “system” loosely, it ended up being more of a haphazard hastily made minute-by-minute strategy.  In the 30 seconds I had to reconvene with my husband, we quickly summarized our progress (“got autoloan paid off, got a pay check, do we have enough money for the mortgage?”) and hurriedly tried to figure out how to make it the next week (“Can you fill this out during work?  As soon as you get the kids, you have to get in line for groceries…”).  The entire simulation was stressful, chaotic, panicked.

Time

The waiting was the worst.  There are a million other places you have to go including the bank to pay your mortgage and the pawn shop to try and score some extra cash, but you have to wait in line for inordinate amounts of time to take care of basic needs.  If you are not from a low-income family, think of the DMV.  Think of those lines at every place you are trying to go.  Then, I would say more than half the time, it closes before you can get up there.  Or they tell you that you are in the wrong line. Those are absolutely awful sinking feelings.  Having waited and waited for something that you desperately need (think food or paying for electric).  When every minute truly counts in this game of survival, you literally can’t afford to be in the wrong line. 

Oftentimes when a family is working poor, trying to get by day to day without financial security, they have a “here and now” mindset.  There is no guarantee of money in the future, so the strategy is to spend everything you have right now, to alleviate some pain or try to catch up.  Planning for the future isn’t an option, because the future is so unstable.  When you are hungry now, you have to eat now.  There is no thought about budgeting or planning.  Doing the simulation as a person from a middle class upbringing, there was a bit of inner discrepancy in how I approached our fake families’ month.  I know my friend Molly, also from the middle class in real life, was in the simulation “very much preparing for the future-- my 16-year-old pregnant daughter was going to social services to prepare for her baby being born in 2 months, I was trying to budget from the start rather than prioritize and make it by week-by-week.  I really believed that there was a "right" way to manage it and if I did it well I would not only get by but would also succeed.”  I think the Yarrow family tried this approach of planning during our 30 second breaks, but it ended up turning to chaos when we didn’t have the correct verification, a store was closed, or we didn’t have enough transportation resources to get somewhere.  There was no option to organize; we just had to do it.  Problem solve on the go, as we passed each other running from agency to agency.

Public Benefits

My family wasn’t on public assistance, we were just trying to work hard, pay our bills, and keep our house.  A true picture of a working poor family.  We actually knew we could get our grandkids health insurance through social services, but we didn’t have time to go wait in line and deal with the system.  We chose food, heat, and keeping our house over health security for our grandkids.  Insurance isn’t a survival part of life, but plenty of other families did have to choose between basic needs.  They chose to wait in line for feed their families, with the hope that the next week they would have enough money to pay the mortgage (and the hope that the mortgage company would have a little mercy.) 

On Edge

My colleague Molly summed it up well: I was worried about how I was going to feed my kids that week. “Even though it was a simulation I felt panicked and guilty and worried in an hour-long simulation and I was not even the worst off .”    If the Yarrows had this much trouble navigating life with their resources in this short month, I can’t imagine a real experience.  I can imagine, though, the results.  Irritability.  Bitterness.   Stress.  And that’s not necessarily hostility aimed at any institution.  It’s just a general frustration.  Why can’t I make this work, even though I am trying to do everything right?  When they came back to evicted “homes” (overturned chairs and a big ugly sign in the simulation), they witnessed the downfall of living in poverty, the result of living for the now.  It’s so easy to not plan ahead well, to not think things through completely, to make what look like stupid decision to the outside world, because you are hungry, your kids are hungry, and you have nowhere else to turn.  Might as well eat now, because who knows when you will have money to eat again.   Nothing is ever guaranteed.  Getting a job is not guaranteed.  Keeping a job is not guaranteed.  

Poverty is Relative

I was grateful that the Yarrow family wasn’t the “worst off.”  Other families had pregnant teenagers, were getting evicted or robbed, or had no family at all for a support network.  When we did the debriefing though, it seemed like no family thought they had it worst, everyone thought that there was always someone with a more dire situation.  Poverty is truly relative.  The government sets the FPIG, and therefore the poverty line is based on income.   I would argue (as I’m sure many others serving the low-income families of America) that poverty is what you make of it.  If it’s a lack of resources, what resources does your family need to survive, and which don’t you have?  My family needed food and childcare.   Other families needed lots of help to pay utility bills, or even basic employment.  If we can’t meet our basic needs and get by day to day, that’s poverty.

Relationships and Survival

Earlier in the day we learned that low income families function around a couple of principles: relationships and survival.  Comparatively, if you look at the middle class, people from this class will function around the achievement principle.   People from the upper class function around the connections they have.  With the lower class, survival is their basic drive.  Relationships can be a force that keep them in poverty (not wanting to leave comfort zone, abandon family, etc), but relationship are also crucial to survival.   If you think about it, low income families are some of the best problem solvers.   They have to be if they want to survive.  I found myself with lowered inhibitions during the simulation.  I had to get what I had to get, and I didn’t care who I had to talk to to do it.  For example, our neighbors were telling everyone around that they would babysit for transportation passes.  When there was a week when we couldn’t send our kids to school and neither of us could stay home, we desperately needed to use this resource.  They had enough transportation passes from other families so we had to trade our stereo for a week of babysitting, but what other choice did we have?  

Again from my colleague Molly -- It really does seem like a blur now that I'm looking back, but I still can't believe that my family only ate for 2 weeks and one of those weeks we only ate because some 85-year-old man overheard me talking about my troubles and gave me $15 to buy the rest of my groceries.  I felt such gratitude in that very small gesture that it almost felt real, and more than anything I wanted to pay him back or pay it forward.