Another Point in Time

Last night I spent the remains of the day helping to conduct the annual Point In Time (PIT) survey.  For those of you not familiar with this, it is the annual, one-day, census of people experiencing homelessness across our nation.  It is ostensibly the data that HUD uses to allocate resources, but in the hands of community action groups like Lifestyles of Maryland it becomes a one day lesson in human compassion for many people who do not see the economic and social tragedy of our nation.  In the NY Times this morning I read this, and it is no surprise to me, because for the past three years I have given a few hours of my time to looking behind the curtain of one of the most affluent areas in the country and seeing the reality of our disgrace.
Here in Southern Maryland, just outside the D.C. beltway, there is a clash of worlds. There is the old, agrarian south, and there is the growing creep of the megapolis, we're right on the boundary of it in Charles County. The article from the Times expresses what is perhaps the most crushing reality of our particular place and point in time.  Right now, the old way of life is practically no way of life at all.  If you work in a service industry or at an entry level job of some sort, you cannot afford to live here.
On the 8:00 PM to midnight shift, the only homeless person we encountered was employed, we actually found her at work while asking people working at restaurants and stores if they had any leads on people experiencing homelessness.  We were giving out resource cards to the employees to share with anyone they might encounter. In what must have taken some courage to tell a couple strangers, she said, "I'm homeless."
Believe me when you encounter people who break all the negative stereotypes we generally heap on homeless people, it will break your heart if you've got one.  Without violating confidentiality, I will tell you that this woman was sheltered, but without anything like adequate housing for her extended family, which included several adult/nearly adult children and also some grandchildren.  Too many mouths to feed and nothing like affordable housing available makes you homeless in this place at this time.
You may quibble with the methodology of studies done by academics that try to quantify and describe poverty, but I've got a better idea for you: volunteer to do Point In Time next January, wherever you live, you won't need any studies to show you the reality.
I have had an unusually busy week, so I was not able to give my usual amount of time to PIT this year.  Lifestyles sent some Americorps volunteers out to the rural part of our county called Nanjemoy, that has become my regular beat for PIT.  In Nanjemoy you encounter the old south part of the county woven in with the new affluent part.  You have colonies of poor people who live back on dirt roads in shacks and trailers, interspersed with very well kept homes with boats and RVs in the driveways.  You might not see the poor people on first glance, but they are there, and they are everywhere.  The reason I couldn't go to Nanjemoy this year was because I really couldn't spend 8-9 hours weaving my way around the hollows finding the unseen people who live in the back waters of our world. One of the Americorps volunteers told the staff that she was originally from Afghanistan, and the poverty of Nanjemoy left her shaken.  Let that sink in, if you doubt the gist of the Times op-ed.  Someone from Afghanistan, war torn, drug riddled, fundamentalist haunted Afghanistan was shocked by the poverty of a place that is half an hour outside of Washington D.C.
Nanjemoy and the rural parts of our county are a testament to the fact that the old way of life just doesn't have much of a place in the new world.  Sure, by Haitian standards the Nanjemoy crowd might be rich, but they don't live in Haiti or the tropics (as the article helpfully points out).  People in most of our nation need adequate shelter and warm clothes, they also have a rather dire need for clean water.  Many of the wells that used to serve these places have gone dry or been contaminated, or simply had a pump go bad.  Property rights can be murky and the political will is simply not there to do anything about it, so people who are already poor either have to buy water or somehow haul it from a reliable source, be it a public well (there are a few), or a kind neighbor's hose spigot.
Anyone who pays attention might know that water, the daily need of all human life, is a major challenge for impoverished people everywhere.  You may have heard the stories of the African women and girls who must haul water up to five miles every day.  You probably have heard about the public water crisis in Flint Michigan, but there are way too many people who don't have such attention grabbing stories that still struggle to get good clean water to drink.
As one of my partners in crime last night and I reflected on our way back from our survey: "There is something wrong with us."  We have too much wealth and too many resources in this great nation of ours to let this sort of thing happen right under our noses.  Working people should not be homeless and no one should have to worry about where their next glass of water is coming from.  This doesn't mean that everyone gets a BMW and big house in the suburbs, but we have to at least start seeing the problem clearly.  No study is going to do that for you, no statistics will reveal it for you, a few hours honestly looking with your heart open definitely will.