Seeing poverty up close

[Liberal_in_LA]

Seeing poverty up close

Compassion blurs the lines when MEND assesses need

By Sandy Banks

November 6, 2010

Joanne Gilbert has seen the effects of our tanking economy close up. Her son with the physics degree couldn't find a job. Her friend's painting firm went belly up. Her husband, a Cal State Long Beach professor, has suffered through furloughs and salary cuts.

But none of that prepared the Northridge nurse for what she encountered last weekend, when she went door-to-door in Pacoima, interviewing families who had applied for Christmas baskets from the charity MEND.

They were living in garages, trailers, rented rooms; cooking on hot plates; sleeping on floors. Gilbert's job was to gauge their "level of need."

"You think you've seen the downside of the economy," she said. "But here you see the trickle down."

Here were people who used to be on the edge and had tumbled into the abyss.

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Herrera greeted him and asked after the woman named on our list. The man waved us off. "She lives in the back," he said. In the back was a garage, converted to a two-bedroom apartment.

Inside was a sliver of a kitchen, with bedrooms walled off by a flowered curtain. Living there were a 32-year-old woman with breast cancer, her ailing mother, out-of-work husband, and their two children.

There was no plasma TV — just a plaque of Jesus on the cross and a paper plate fastened with Halloween streamers dangling from the ceiling. The young mother sat on a child-sized chair, a white scarf wrapped around her bald head, as Herrera gently questioned her.




http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-banks-20101106,0,5955450.column

[Naturyl]

1. K&R for reality

Kicked on its way down to the bottom of the deep blue sea....

In before the yawns.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. dead link

[Liberal_in_LA]

6. fixed

[handmade34]

3. dupe

[handmade34]

4. your link didn't work for me

this did

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-banks-20101106,0,5955450.column

[Liberal_in_LA]

5. THANKS

[handmade34]

7. more from the article

""from a volunteer. "If we see a nice car in the driveway, a plasma TV, but they say 'I just lost my job,' can we ask for proof or do we just believe them?" "Use you judgment," Herrera told us. I looked around at the volunteers — church ladies, a construction worker, college kids — nodding and taking notes. The weight of that word judgment unsettled me.

"It didn't feel right," said Matt Clark, a freshman at Cal State Northridge who volunteered... "To go through their houses and see what they don't have, that was a little awkward for us. It was pretty crazy — three families, 15 people, living in one house. I can't imagine their experiences." ""

MY WORDS: I have many times talked here about my job. I don't judge who gets help, but I go into neighborhoods everyday and assess the area. I see the people and how they live. I see proverty up close every other day (I also go into uber-rich neighborhoods and middle income neighborhoods). We have collectively lost our ability to be empathic and especially the politicians going into Washington DC are for the most part devoid of empathy.

I can imagine poverty, I have experienced it and see it often. We must change how and what we do.

[Liberal_in_LA]

8. the article ends with the author called illegal immigration the 'elephant in the room'

and just as she suspects - the first comment to the article attacks illegal immigration. missing her point that when you look poverty in the eye, it's hard to NOT help

[Warpy]

9. Here in NM, it can be a camper shell on cinderblocks

(and winter temperatures here in the desert might be balmy during the day, but they drop fast overnight into the teens), an old trailer patched with odds and ends of sheet metal and plywood with no electricity or plumbing, or a tar paper and tarp lean to in the woods near the river. This is how the marginal workers who are lucky enough to escape being warehoused in shelters lived before the economic disaster. Now they no longer have those jobs and have to make the rounds of charity kitchens in order to eat.

They are completely invisible to the people who live in the trophy house district--or the people there who haven't lost those houses. Yet.

[kelly1mm]

10. K and R. Please make this an election issue! nt