Two Januarys back, when the Pennsylvania legislature voted to declare 2012 the Year of the Bible, they intended to recognize a “national need to study and apply the teachings of the holy scriptures.” They were echoing, almost word for word, a resolution of the 97th Congress enjoining President Reagan to make a similar proclamation for the year 1983.
Like their predecessors, the Pennsylvania legislators were strong on the scriptures’ general applicability, but rather light on specifics. Perhaps they got stuck on the thorn of interpretation. When it came to the problem of poverty, for instance, should the commonwealth adopt Jesus’s apparent resignation in Matthew 26 (“Ye have the poor always with you”)? Or should it follow his directive in Luke 10, in the parable about the Samaritan who opened his purse for a needy traveler (“Go, and do thou likewise”)?
On Nov. 6, the Community Action Commission, an anti-poverty organization serving the tri-county area, hosted an event to raise awareness of the plight of being poor. The event, called a “poverty simulation,” took place in the auditorium of Capital Academy, a special-education school in a converted warehouse across from the N. Cameron Street scrapyard.
In Pennsylvania, about 12 percent of the population lives in poverty. In Dauphin County, nearly 32,000 people are poor; around 12,000 of them, or one in three, are under the age of 17. Community Action Commission, whose main office is on Derry Street, serves a small slice of this population, helping them find jobs or get energy assistance, and providing educational programs on things like good parenting and personal finance.
The simulation was one of the commission’s occasional efforts to reach a different audience: corporations, non-profits, the press and, of course, elected officials. State Rep. Patty Kim and state Sen. Rob Teplitz were there, along with representatives of U.S. Reps. Lou Barletta and Scott Perry and U.S. Sen. Bob Casey.
In the auditorium, a perimeter of folding tables, representing various stores and agencies, surrounded several dozen chairs that, grouped in clusters, stood for the families’ apartments and houses. The effect, intentional or not, was claustrophobic: an existence bound on all sides by institutions that may or may not offer aid. When I checked in, I was asked whether I wanted to be a child or a decision-maker. I opted for the former and was assigned the role of Franco Fuentes, age 17, living with his mother and sister. The father had abandoned the family.
Before the start of the first week, there was a presentation by Joe Ostrander, the communications director for CAAP, a statewide association that assists the 43 community action agencies across Pennsylvania. He explained that a sister association, based in Missouri, had developed the simulation 15 years ago, using profiles of actual families they served, but fictionalizing the names and addresses. (That explained my house number, which was in “Realville, MO, 99999.”)
Ostrander laid out some ground rules. Each “week,” lasting 15 minutes, would begin with the blowing of a whistle. If a participant had a job, she had to report to work, represented by an array of chairs in one corner, and sit there a while (seven minutes for a full-time job, four minutes for part-time). Students, likewise, had to park themselves in makeshift classrooms. Any necessary visits—to the grocery store, bank, utility company, social services—had to be made in the remaining time. Whenever a participant went anywhere, she had to fork over a transportation pass. “Transportation is a huge issue,” Ostrander said. “These passes, you’ll come to realize, are far more valuable than any money you’ll make.”
The Fuentes family took stock of its situation. None of us were employed. My sister was in school, but I was a dropout, and our profile said I had gotten a neighbor’s daughter pregnant. We had $10 cash, two transportation passes and about $600 in assets, although most of these assets would be hard to give up: one was a refrigerator; another was an oven. Initially, I thought about applying for a job, but, after some discussion, we concluded we were in too much of an emergency. We couldn’t afford food, and we had no way of getting around. We decided to seek assistance.
The whistle blew. My mother shot off for social services, while I headed to the community action agency, in the hopes of scaring up a few transit passes. When I got there, they asked me my name and age, told me I needed to come back with my mother, and took my transportation pass. I walked over to my mother and told her what had happened. She was waiting in a long line. She gave an exasperated laugh.
“All right,” she said. “Go to the pawn shop and try to sell some things.”
I went home. All of our things had been stolen. The facilitator called out, “Eight minutes.”
The pitfall of any simulation of crisis is that its lessons are only as serious as its participants. Ostrander, in his introduction, urged us to approach the exercise with as much gravity as possible. “This is not Milton Bradley,” he said. “For you, this is a game, but for some people, this is real life.”
You can urge people to be earnest, but can you take the mischief out of a congressional dealmaker, or the perkiness out of a prep-school wonk? As the game progressed, some unappealing traces of hysteria and glee crept into the feverish bustle of the shortened weeks. One week, a man with a fake gun pursued someone, firing and grinning. Another week ended with an announcement: “Did somebody lose this?” The facilitator held up a ridiculous plush animal, which was supposed to symbolize an infant.
Confronted with obvious fiction, the mind begins to search for real-world corollaries. The simulation included a police officer, whom we tried to engage after the looting of our apartment. “Do you have a description of the thief?” he asked kindly. The question seemed to communicate all the hopelessness facing an impoverished victim of crime.
Later, when I went to look for a job, a young desk worker slid an application towards me. It was two-sided, filled with forbidding boxes requesting my educational history, my references, my previous employers—things that Franco Fuentes, like many real people, did not have. I was angry. If they would just hire me, I wanted to say, they would see that I showed up on time and worked hard. But a line of similar stories was piling up behind me. I took the application home.
By the end of the month, our circumstances had improved. My mother—in real life, a math teacher at Capital Academy whose name I never learned—was a force of nature. She managed to wade through the paperwork at social services and come away with vouchers for food and utilities. I got hired as a security guard and earned enough to pay for our rent and an outstanding loan. We even put a few dollars into savings.
The event wrapped up with a group conversation. Participants had taken away different things. “It’s a great simulation,” someone observed, “but it’s not taking into account the emotional stress.”
One woman struck a note of indignation. “People learn how to navigate the system and not only get around it, but make more than I do. And are proud of it.” She mentioned a rumor of a “class in a basement,” where people reportedly learned how to game the aid agencies.
“There’s always fraud, abuse and waste,” Ostrander acknowledged. “My editorial here, though, is that there’s fraud, abuse and waste in every system. Business leaders avoid taxes, for example. Or avoid laws and regulations.”
The problem with a poverty simulation, as Ostrander would doubtless be quick to acknowledge, is that you can’t really simulate poverty. As Tressie McMillan Cottom, a poverty researcher at UC-Davis, wrote in a recent essay, “You have no idea what you would do if you were poor until you are poor.” But the event could still be a testing ground for the suppositions participants brought to the game.
On my first day of work, for example, I found myself next to Rob Teplitz, the freshman state senator from Dauphin County. We’d crossed paths once in the simulation already: he was Mr. Chen, the father of the girl I’d gotten pregnant. (When I tried to visit their home, Teplitz looked up and said, without skipping a beat, “Haven’t you done enough?”) To occupy our time at work, the organizers had provided questionnaires to examine our beliefs about poverty.
As Teplitz worked his way through the prompts, I peered over his shoulder. He had just answered number seven: “Is moving people out of poverty part of your organization’s goals?”
I had interpreted the prompt as a simple identifier—did you work for an aid agency, or not? But for a legislator, the question, I thought, was more philosophical. Under it, in small blue script, Teplitz had written “yes.”
Community Action Commission is located at 1514 Derry St., Harrisburg. CAC always needs volunteers and support. For more information, visit www.cactricounty.org or call 717-232-9757.
