By JAN LARSON McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
Luke Shaefer used to compile data about poverty from the comfort of his office. That data took on a different look when he met a woman selling her plasma to support her family, and another family working but not making enough to get out of a shelter.
Shaefer, who spoke at Bowling Green State University last week, is author of “$2.00 a Day, Living on Almost Nothing in America.”
Poverty is on the rise, with 1.5 million American households, including 3 million children, living on $2 a day.
These are families “really, really far below the poverty line,” Shaefer said.
America has tried to solve poverty. But where government programs have failed, it simply gives the programs new names. Such is the case with the food stamps program, which is now dubbed SNAP. “The one thing we like to do is give it a new name,” Shaefer said.
Several communities also offer housing assistance, even though long waiting lists exist in some cities.
But what is still missing for those in extreme poverty is cash. So Shaefer, a self-described data nerd, set out to study the effects of that. He was joined in his study by Kathryn Edin, whose style was to get out from being a desk and talk with people.
Shaefer, who was moved to do the same, found himself deeply affected by the people he met. He came to realize that he could learn more spending one day with someone like Madonna Harris in Chicago than he could in three months of scouring through data at his desk.
Harris had held the same job for eight years, when one day her cash drawer came up $10 short. “She was fired on the spot,” Shaefer said. The missing money was found at the business the next day, but Harris was not offered back her job.
So Harris and her teenage daughter lost their apartment, and moved from one homeless shelter to another, since the maximum stay at Chicago shelters is three months. Her daughter, who had been on the school honor roll, had to miss many days of school.
In between field research, Shaefer would return to his job at the University of Michigan. “I got to go back to my nice office in Ann Arbor,” he said.
About a year later, Shaefer returned to Chicago, this time with his family for a vacation. On a morning coffee run, he ran into Harris and her daughter on the street.
“The year had taken its toll,” he said. Harris had a job, but didn’t make enough money to get out of the shelter. He knew Harris to be a hard worker, a survivor, but yet she couldn’t make it out.
“How many time do we walk past someone like Madonna Harris and not think what their story is,” Shaefer said. “How many times are we sitting in class with someone like that. These things can seem invisible.”
Those in America with money and those without money live “parallel lives” and know so little about each other. Those with money often have their biases reinforced by “evidence” they see as further proof about the poor being lazy. An example such as Harris is discounted as an outlier.
“There’s this perception that poor families don’t work,” but that just isn’t so, Shaefer said.
The problem isn’t that Americans are stingy. “We give more to charity than any other country,” he said.
Urban areas like Chicago are actually better at helping their poor than rural areas, Shaefer’s research showed.
“There’s one food bank in the entire state of Mississippi,” he said. “In the places where people need the most, we find the services are less.”
The lack of money makes nearly everything more difficult. Poor families spend so much time just surviving from one day to the next – keeping their utilities on, avoiding eviction, keeping their children clothed.
Shaefer told of another woman he met during research, who had what looked like drug track lines on her arm. “We started to see it on every person,” he said of the marks. They weren’t doing drugs, they were selling plasma to make money.
The woman, just over 5 feet tall and 110 pounds, was selling plasma twice a week. In order to avoid being rejected, she would eat an iron-rich bar before she went to donate. Because the process made her nervous which would raise her blood pressure, the woman would first go to the public library – “the living room of the extreme poor in the U.S.” – and read from a Nicholas Sparks novel.
“This was the only money coming in,” so it was important that she not be turned away, Shaefer explained.
Plasma donations may be a sign of the times, with sales tripling in the last decade, he said. The U.S., which is the only country where a person can sell their plasma more than once weekly, is responsible for 65 percent of the world’s plasma supply, he added.
“I don’t think we should live in a country” where people have to sell plasma to survive, Shaefer said.
Others without money sell their SNAP credits in order to get cash that can pay for utilities, diapers, or clothing for children. “Families on the very edge” can get groceries at food banks – but they need cash.
There are two problems with this, since the “exchange rate” charged by some cashiers turns $100 of SNAP credits into $60 cash, and since SNAP trafficking is a “very serious felony” punishable with up to 20 years in prison or a $250,000 fine.
“You could rob a bank and probably face less jail time,” Shaefer said.
Something is wrong when families feel forced to sell plasma or their SNAP.
“That’s what we make people do when they are hungry,” he said. “It’s a bad set of choices a lot of families feel they have.”
Food pantries are the most common type of charitable effort to help the poor in America – yet many of them are feeling the strain of growing demands.
Shaefer told of his effort to help a person desperately in need of food. As he sat in his office, drinking a Starbucks latte, he called pantry after pantry, trying to reach a human being. He never did. Their answering machines said they were too busy to staff the phones. For Shaefer, it was frustrating being put on hold. But for a person in poverty with limited cell phone time, it could be far worse.
That “social isolation” for the poor is a common occurrence. “That’s what it’s like to be on the other side. That experience of social rejection triggers the same brain activity as physical pain. It’s like being punched.”
America has yet to learn how to help the poor while leaving their dignity intact.
“So much of what we do for poor people strips them of any dignity,” Shaefer said.
For example, government programs often operate under the notion that people in poverty are there because they don’t work hard enough.
“There’s a long and time-honored obsession” that people getting government help with food will cheat the system. “Most people who go to the food bank are actually very hungry.” Some are turned away if they don’t have rental leases to prove their residency. But many don’t have the means to rent, he said.
“Food insecurity” spikes in the summer when children can’t get food at school. “In a lot of cases, it’s the only meal kids are getting every day.”
