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Other articles in Part 1 Oregon's unseen poor Remarriage and training help single mom escape poverty Homelessness in Oregon, Life on the streets Official government poverty line shows signs of old age 1999 federal poverty guidelines

Workshop simulates what it's like to be poor story by Andy Duncan A person can't know what it's like to experience genuine poverty until he or she has. But try thinking of it as a dark honeycomb of tunnels. Confusing. Frustrating. No way out. That's the way I felt during a recent workshop. The goal of the workshop, put on by the OSU Extension Service, was to give middle-income Oregonians a sense of some of the obstacles poor people face. About 40 of us, mostly from the Willamette Valley, converged on a room at the university. In a single hour we were supposed to get a sense of what it was like to be poor for a month (four 15-minute periods, each representing a week). Our leaders assigned roles in a make-believe community. I was the 14-year-old daughter in a poor, single-parent family. Other roles included retiree, single person in poverty, undocumented worker, banker, pawnshop owner, teacher, food pantry operator and welfare caseworker. I didn't buy the approach. It seemed like a superficial way to try to teach Oregonians about an important issue. But I went to my assigned table. "Somebody else be the mother. I was a single, homeless mom with kids in 1979. I've done this in real life," announced Sharon Thornberry, a short, dark-haired woman sitting across from me. So Sharon became my younger brother and the third person assigned to our "family," Linda Lees, agreed to be the mother. Our family received an envelope containing a description of our financial situation and some cash and bus tokens. The first 15-minute "week" began. Sharon and I found our way to school while our mother went off to take care of the necessities of life, armed with practical hints from Sharon such as "eating is a priority, so go to the food pantry before you try to sign up at the welfare office." The situation consumed us quickly. Poverty, even simulated poverty, was hard, really hard, especially for our mother, Linda. Before the second week was over, she was saying things like, "My children have to eat and have a place to sleep. I go here and I go there and back here and back there and I spend all my time trying to deal with those necessities. How do I find time to give the kids the other things a parent should?" At school, I was embarrassed. My family didn't have the resources that would allow me to participate in activities with other kids. By the third week, I began to care less whether I was a good student. Here are a few observations from others who took part in the workshop: "We worked just as hard as we could but we always came out behind," said a person assigned the role of mother in a two-parent family. "We had good kids but they started going bad." "A lot of these were struggles that all families face," said the father. "But then you add poverty to that." "I didn't get to eat for the first week," said a person who had the role of a child. "My parents hardly came home from the welfare and unemployment and other offices. I felt like it was a cycle we couldn't get out of." A woman given the role of a three-year-old explained how her mother dragged her from office to office. "It must be very hard on young children," she said. "You're living in poverty and in crisis." The man who ran the employment office said jobs were available, but he could see that many of the people who came to him were not qualified for them. A school teacher observed that many poor children had a hard time getting to school and were hungry when they did get there. Summarizing the comments in our "debriefing," people who had experienced true poverty said the simulation seemed to trigger some of the anxiety and frustration of the real thing. The rest of us felt we had had a tiny glimpse of how agonizingly difficult the real thing must be.   Article 4 of 6 in Part 1   back to top

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