Poverty
Sorry this isn't very good. I don't have any good pictures either sorry...
Music: Less than Jake, The Bruce Lee Band, Brave Saint Saturn, Sum 41, The Peacocks, The Lawrence Arms, Johnny Cash, Neil Young, Coldplay, R.E.M., Skank’in Pickle, Mike Park, King Apparatus, Bagheera, The Rudiments, Let’s Go Bowling, Slapstick, Bob Dylan, Roper, Mu330, Relient K, Philmore, Ghoti Hook, Ace Troubleshooter, and Five Iron Frenzy
Well I hope this post finds you well, life here is going good nothing to big, work, study, and seeing friends. Why work tomorrow, oh so sad...
Hey a couple of things. If you get the chance you should see the movie Why We Fight it looks good, very interesting, I saw a long trailer and it doesn’t look like it is one sided but just asks the question how did America get to be the defender of the world and our money and armies get so intertwined.
Also if you live in the Twin Cities on Friday March 3rd at 7:00pm at Bethlehem we are going to watch a documentary about the AIDS crisis in Africa. It is called Dear Francis,. It should be good and then after the documentary they do a phone interview with the filmmaker and then all are invited to The Corner (that's what Mitch and I call the house, we are very clever) to hang out, talk about the movie, or play games and have some fun.
Anyway poverty. In reality I am not the best person to talk about this, Missy, Eileen and Scott have been going to this class for about six months so if you want to talk more about the idea of poverty, race, and redemption they would be the best people to talk to. If you don’t know them ah, well I got nothing for you, so sorry, my bad, my bad…
Well they had a special activity for the class last week; it was called a poverty simulation. It is an exercise where you have to handle the finances for a family of five on a little over minimum wage. You have to make decisions like do we own a car or ride the bus, rent or own, how to handle health care, and child care. There is some chance involved like people get sick or you get a promotion at work, some good some bad, it seemed pretty “realistic” considering it was a simulation. If you ran out of money you could go to social services for help or try and get a new job, or a second job or a third job.
Our family “made it” meaning we had money at the end of the month well we had zero dollars left but we didn’t have less than zero dollars. Hooray for us!!! Anyway we did the right things we decided to own, we bought a car, we didn’t have health insurance, which wasn’t good, but that is the way things go. We had to make some tough choices. Anyway what I noticed was that me made it, but at what cost. Dad was working at night mom was working two jobs one on the weekend or dad was working seven days a week. We lived in a neighborhood where we were “scared” for our safety, or the game told us we were, but we decided to stick it out.
Yes, financially our family survived but we would be in shambles, we would never see each other, we had no recreational activities. I mean how long would we be able to pull that off, we struggled through for a month and a simulation and we were all stressed by then end of it, well I was stressed. The values that most people judge their lives like how do we give the best and most opportunities to our children, how do we let our interpersonal relationships of our family thrive were thrown out the window. The bottom line became the bottom line. Money in the end was all that mattered.
We, like every other group, had to make a trip to social services and “they” (Ben Piper) told us we made to much money. We would have to be making about half of what we were making, somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,500 a month.
Anyway it really put into question the idea that anyone can work themselves out of poverty. It would have taken one big disaster and we would have been sunk. And even the though of doing this for years and years it is easy, very easy to see why these families don’t make it. Why many marriages that are dealing with this end in separation or divorce.
If you have a chance to ever go through a poverty simulation, do it. It will help your worldview; help increase your heart for helping those around you who struggle financially. I don’t think I need to let people know about helping the poor. We need to help more, we need to care and, we need to do more. And we need to have compassion we need to get involved, it will not be and easy road, it will be difficult and you will get hurt and it will be tough but we can start making a difference. It’s time to care...
Sorry this is probably grammatically bad and not very good spelling either.
Godspeed,
Caleb M. Saarela
“Wealth is a Ghetto”
unknown
Music: Less than Jake, The Bruce Lee Band, Brave Saint Saturn, Sum 41, The Peacocks, The Lawrence Arms, Johnny Cash, Neil Young, Coldplay, R.E.M., Skank’in Pickle, Mike Park, King Apparatus, Bagheera, The Rudiments, Let’s Go Bowling, Slapstick, Bob Dylan, Roper, Mu330, Relient K, Philmore, Ghoti Hook, Ace Troubleshooter, and Five Iron Frenzy
Well I hope this post finds you well, life here is going good nothing to big, work, study, and seeing friends. Why work tomorrow, oh so sad...
Hey a couple of things. If you get the chance you should see the movie Why We Fight it looks good, very interesting, I saw a long trailer and it doesn’t look like it is one sided but just asks the question how did America get to be the defender of the world and our money and armies get so intertwined.
Also if you live in the Twin Cities on Friday March 3rd at 7:00pm at Bethlehem we are going to watch a documentary about the AIDS crisis in Africa. It is called Dear Francis,. It should be good and then after the documentary they do a phone interview with the filmmaker and then all are invited to The Corner (that's what Mitch and I call the house, we are very clever) to hang out, talk about the movie, or play games and have some fun.
Anyway poverty. In reality I am not the best person to talk about this, Missy, Eileen and Scott have been going to this class for about six months so if you want to talk more about the idea of poverty, race, and redemption they would be the best people to talk to. If you don’t know them ah, well I got nothing for you, so sorry, my bad, my bad…
Well they had a special activity for the class last week; it was called a poverty simulation. It is an exercise where you have to handle the finances for a family of five on a little over minimum wage. You have to make decisions like do we own a car or ride the bus, rent or own, how to handle health care, and child care. There is some chance involved like people get sick or you get a promotion at work, some good some bad, it seemed pretty “realistic” considering it was a simulation. If you ran out of money you could go to social services for help or try and get a new job, or a second job or a third job.
Our family “made it” meaning we had money at the end of the month well we had zero dollars left but we didn’t have less than zero dollars. Hooray for us!!! Anyway we did the right things we decided to own, we bought a car, we didn’t have health insurance, which wasn’t good, but that is the way things go. We had to make some tough choices. Anyway what I noticed was that me made it, but at what cost. Dad was working at night mom was working two jobs one on the weekend or dad was working seven days a week. We lived in a neighborhood where we were “scared” for our safety, or the game told us we were, but we decided to stick it out.
Yes, financially our family survived but we would be in shambles, we would never see each other, we had no recreational activities. I mean how long would we be able to pull that off, we struggled through for a month and a simulation and we were all stressed by then end of it, well I was stressed. The values that most people judge their lives like how do we give the best and most opportunities to our children, how do we let our interpersonal relationships of our family thrive were thrown out the window. The bottom line became the bottom line. Money in the end was all that mattered.
We, like every other group, had to make a trip to social services and “they” (Ben Piper) told us we made to much money. We would have to be making about half of what we were making, somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,500 a month.
Anyway it really put into question the idea that anyone can work themselves out of poverty. It would have taken one big disaster and we would have been sunk. And even the though of doing this for years and years it is easy, very easy to see why these families don’t make it. Why many marriages that are dealing with this end in separation or divorce.
If you have a chance to ever go through a poverty simulation, do it. It will help your worldview; help increase your heart for helping those around you who struggle financially. I don’t think I need to let people know about helping the poor. We need to help more, we need to care and, we need to do more. And we need to have compassion we need to get involved, it will not be and easy road, it will be difficult and you will get hurt and it will be tough but we can start making a difference. It’s time to care...
Sorry this is probably grammatically bad and not very good spelling either.
Godspeed,
Caleb M. Saarela
“Wealth is a Ghetto”
unknown
Labels: Serious Stuff, Social Justice
posted by Caleb M. Saarela at 9:30 PM
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