stamps I

In celebration of moving to a new place, in honor of recent events involving my checkbook, and in light of my October 26th post, I headed to the local food stamps office this morning.

9:40 am After checking in at work, picking up a book (good idea), shedding an extra jacket (bad idea), and grabbing my lunch (also a bad idea), I set off on the three-block walk I've often described to my clients to the Human Resources Administration office.

9:44 am I arrive, to see a line out the door and halfway down the street. I get in the queue and think about the irony of making people seeking help with food and healthcare stand outside in the cold (it felt like 31 degrees) to get it. I remind myself that I wanted the experience, and brace myself for some genuine participant observation. I also think about how much I'm going to wish I had kept that extra layer on.

9:59 am My section of the line is finally let inside, where I continue to stand on line (NY for "standing in line") for a good hour, reading my book and eavesdropping on my neighbors talking about why they won't be voting tomorrow ("you know they throw out half the ballots anyway") and the various failings of the HRA office.

10:03 am (Okay, so from here on the times are approximate, because by this point I've realized this just might not be the super-impressive traumatic-but-revealing participant observation experience I was expecting when I arrived.) I get to the receptionist, who gives me a green sheet of paper and tells me to take the elevators to the fourth floor and wait until my number is called.

10:04 am As I head for the elevators, a security guard stops me and says I can't bring food, and I must "go back around the corner and leave it in the 2nd office". The directions make no sense, and eventually another guard takes pity on me, and sends me to the elevators another way, under strict instructions not to open my lunch.

10:13 I arrive at the food stamps part of the office with the number 1049. There are no numbers on the signboard. No one has been called yet (the office has been open since 8:30). It feels like an airport because we're watching CNN sitting in cheap plastic seats waiting to hear magic words on the PA system.

10:34 The first number - 1030, is finally called. CNN is showing videos of one of it's anchors dancing.

11:46 My number is finally called. I go up to the counter where the receptionist gives my application a preliminary going-through. "Uh-oh, we have a problem", she says when she sees my income (which puts me over 130% of the poverty line, and thus makes single-no-dependents-non-disabled-not-elderly me ineligible). This is my cue. I whip out my copy of the National and Community Service Act of 1990 and a USDA opinion from 2001 which states that the AmeriCorps living allowance not be considered income when determining eligibility for need-based federal assistance programs.

She reads my document (dated in 2007) and asks me if I have anything more recent, because "our regulations are always changing". Umm...they're your regulations, right? She tells my case worker to go ahead and do the interview, and that they will "investigate" and see if my income really is excluded.

11:48 My interview starts. My case worker is an African-American man in his 40s. His desk is covered in piles of papers. He asks questions about my jobs, my living situation, my bank accounts. After awhile he sends me down the hall to be finger-imaged.

12:26 Finger-imaging = finger printing. It's one of the more controversial and most unnecessary parts of the food stamps application -- it doesn't cut down on fraud and makes applying for government benefits feel criminal. It's required for every New Yorker over 18 receiving food stamps (so I've had clients whose whole families are ineligible for food stamps because 19-year-old son who still lives with mom can't be bothered to go down to the office).

12:45 Back to my case worker. He goes over a few more things, tells me I'll hear back in one to thirty days, and, as an afterthought, prints me a receipt, which he "should do anyway", but apparently doesn't do often. I get him to put down his name and phone number too, so I can get in touch with him directly if I have problems with my case or disagree with his decision.

So, in summary: it wasn't as bad as I expected. I've heard plenty of stories of hostile, belligerent, harassed case workers and overwrought applicants, and I didn't see that. It was a busy day and I still not only turned in my application but also had my interview and was out within 3.5 hours.

BUT...it certainly was not as good as it could have been. I was at the DMV a month ago and can't help comparing the two experiences with local bureaucracy. The DMV was fully equipped for long lines. The staff were equally busy and impersonal, but the communication was clearer and the customer service more professional. The building was much cleaner and more comfortable.

And thus my food stamps case was born.

Also, now taking guesses as to how long it will take me to hear back in the comments section of this post.

"go gentrify the dark side, baby"

It's one of the sad ironies of the real post-college world that if you are young and progressive, chances are you're working/interning for more or less no $$, and chances are that your only (urban) living options (short of mom and dad) involve moving in to lower-income minority neighborhoods. Thus some of the people most likely to be aware of (and troubled by) gentrification tend to be the ones who get it started, paving the way for the young professionals, who make things comfortable for the couples who treat their dogs like children, who provide business for the "dachshund spas and PBR-swilling butchers" (thanks to a particularly clever craigslist post for that one). By the time you see a white baby in a stroller, it's all over.

With all this in mind, I set out to find a more long-term living situation about a month ago. My office sits on the border between Bedford-Stuyvesant (historically African-American) and Bushwick (predominately Puerto Rican and Dominican), and my budget pretty much limited me to those two neighborhoods anyway. (You can rent a 2-bedroom apartment in some major cities for what it costs to rent a room in a shared loft in NYC. One candidate for governor is running under the umbrella of The Rent is Too Damn High Party. While his candidacy is not particularly serious, his issue and his facial hair certainly are.)

As I considered my options, I asked for input from a couple of my co-workers (both African-American and long-time area residents). My final decision came down to a place in BedStuy (where I was told that proximity to the precinct did not necessarily equal safety) and one in "the dark side" of Bushwick (so named because it is primarily residential/industrial, and not particularly well lit at night). I chose Bushwick, so, in the words of one of my advisors, I'm off to "gentrify the dark side, baby".

How do I feel about that?

Not as bad as I expected, for a couple of reasons. First, neighborhoods are always in flux. Bushwick traces it's written history back to a deal between Dutch settlers and the Lenape Native Americans, and has undergone English, German, and Italian incarnations, to name a few. A healthy response to gentrification is not trying to keep neighborhoods ethnically homogeneous, but ensuring that working-class neighborhoods remain affordable for those who grew up there. I'm proud to say that my organization was originally founded for this purpose and continues to work to ensure that low-income folks can live and work in North Brooklyn. Secondly, I'm living in one of the communities that a lot of my clients come from. I still disagree with the folks who are taking advantage of cheap rent in ethnic neighborhoods in Brooklyn only to sleep there while working, shopping, and basically living in Manhattan. But my situation is different. Since I started working I've walked through BedStuy to work most mornings, and will try to continue to walk from my new place in Bushwick (although anyone who's seen me outdoors in below 50 degrees is rightfully skeptical). I'm interested in being here. And finally - I'm living in a former yarn factory converted to loft apartments, so I'm not technically displacing anyone, except perhaps the previous, most likely hipster, residents.

A note on the building (as it is the likely source of future blog inspiration). It is. Incredibly. Hipster. Asymmetrical haircuts, cheap cigarettes, and big, unnecessary glasses everywhere (except my apartment, as far as I can tell). Apparently some of the residents actually tried to secede from Brooklyn (their complaint: the destructive economic forces of development) but failed to do so because they couldn't find a wealthy donor to buy the building and turn it over to the residents.

Yes, you read that right.

helping

The scene: a planning meeting for a non-profit about an upcoming event to promote access to healthy food in one of New York's lower-income minority neighborhoods.

The characters: me, one of the other volunteers - a young woman we shall call "A" (mostly because I forgot her name), and Mark (who doesn't say anything, but he was there).

The exchange:

A: [to me] So, what do you do?

Me: I work for a small non-profit. Our clients are low-income job seekers and I screen them for public benefits like food stamps and Medicaid and help them apply if they qualify.

A: [excited] Oh! You've have to tell them that they can use their stamps at the farmers' markets!

Me: Yeah, I'm pretty excited about that myself! I'll be getting food stamps in a couple of weeks and I'm looking forward to using the Health Bucks program [NYC initiative that gives you $2 extra for every $5 of your food stamps you use at certain markets].

A: [taken aback] Isn't your organization ashamed that you have to use food stamps?

The message: Working to help poor people = good, more power to you. Sharing some of their lived experience...umm... [shuffle feet, look at the ground].

Once upon a time I guess I thought the problem of well-intentioned, wealthy outsiders "helping" the poor while remaining isolated in their compounds and 4-wheel drives was only a problem in the developing world. Surely those fighting poverty in the US faced fewer barriers of wealth, culture, privilege, safety, geographical proximity...surely they would actually know some poor people.

Wrong.

On slow afternoons in the office I've been reading the book All You Can Eat: How hungry is America? by NYC anti-hunger advocate Joel Berg. My favorite part so far was a chart comparing views on welfare and poverty in the political Right and Left. After highlighting different understandings of the causes of poverty, attitudes towards entitlement etc., the chart ends with "People who make poverty policy spend very little - or no - actual time with poor people".

This, of course, was in both columns.

"A" is no poverty policy-maker (thankfully), but she was in a low income community with the intention of helping. Yet I remain skeptical about how much "help" anyone from a privileged background can offer when they've never even considered the possibility of living a bit like the people they serve.

double take

Another confession: One of my greatest pleasures is nearly causing traffic accidents by being places no young white woman is expected to be while doing things no young white woman is expected to be doing.

This afternoon as I was driving the farm Kawasaki (like an ATV) out to the field to do my harvesting I noticed a man driving by on the road lean his head out of his window and turn to look not once, not twice, but three times. It was the same look I got in Wal-Mart (yes, Wal-Mart, because sissy rainboots from Target just weren't going to do) when the woman at the check-out asked me why I needed big black rubber boots and I answered that I was a farm worker (for the record, I have since worn a big hole in aforementioned black boots). It was the same look I got in Cambodia when spotted squatting in the shade under my house hand-washing my clothes every Sunday afternoon. A number of chickens, dogs, and small children narrowly escaped injury under the moto wheels of the people who turned to stare. It's the same look I get any time I walk along the road in Nairobi (white women are, after all, expected to travel in the safety of their Land Rovers).

But the secret sense of pride I'm used to feeling is a little more mixed now. I'm starting to recognize that it's only because I'm so well-off that I can choose to live in places or do work that those who live/work there might not choose if given the option. I can dabble in life in a Cambodian slum (with the safety of the world's best med-evac insurance should I contract a life-threatening illness that my hosts deal with all the time), hang out in a garden in Kibera for an afternoon (and afterwards head to a US-style coffeeshop for a snack and a latte), or spend a year harvesting vegetables (with my longest day of field work being 8:30-5:00, unlike the 10 hours a day, 6 days a week worked by the immigrant strawberry pickers in the next field).

It takes a little of the thrill out of hearing guera (Spanish slang for blonde girl), barang (Khmer, meaning French person - three guesses who colonized Cambodia), or mzungu (Swahili for white person, with etymological roots in "dizzy" and "aimless wanderer") to think about it that way.

consumer charity II

Yesterday I wrote about some of the ethical complications I see in the conspicuous efforts of companies to tie buying certain products to charity donations. It’s probably not surprising that this isn’t the only US “giving” practice that makes me cringe.

On my way to and from visiting the Angkor Wat temples while I was in Cambodia, one particular village caught my eye. All the houses were made of the same green corrugated iron (which strikes me as impractical in a hot, sunny climate), but this didn’t make it stand out – groups like Habitat for Humanity and Tabitha make houses that look similar. What was special about that village was that in front of every house, placed close to the road for maximum visibility, was a sign with little American flags announcing the name of the donor whose funds had built the house. I wonder what kind of people really needed to know that their names would be displayed in a language none of the locals would be able to read in order to give money to construct a home.

I see this as an extreme example of common need in the West to make our giving personal. A more typical scenario is child sponsorship. For $30-35 a month I can provide a child with school books, basic medical care, and a nutritious lunch every day (or something along those lines). In turn, I get the child’s picture for my refrigerator and receive occasional letters from him or her.

On the surface, this doesn’t seem like a bad arrangement. Rather than just throwing money at big problems like poverty, underdevelopment, malnutrition or child labor, I get to know (or at least think I know) that my money is making life better for little Joseph in Tanzania.

Except it’s rarely that simple. The reality is that organizations like World Vision and Save the Children with child sponsorship programs often pool the money for sponsorship within a certain community – so I’m supporting Joseph’s village, not just Joseph. That seems fair. After all, it’s a bit offensive to think that Joseph is receiving more care than his playmates because I picked him out of a catalog of children. But even though the funds may be combined for community projects, child sponsorship organizations still use a significant amount of their resources facilitating and administering the connection between the donor and the sponsored child. If those resources could be going instead to providing more books or mosquito nets, at what point does sponsorship become more about me than about the kids?

Perhaps it’s natural for us to want a human connection in our attempts to do something to address the suffering in the world. And perhaps its better to use money connecting sponsors with kids than for that money to not be given in the first place (though I’m not convinced – perhaps a future post on that). But at least we can start by being honest about the importance of feeling good in our attempts to do good.

consumer charity

This post deserves a bit of a “Sarah on her high horse” warning. Sometimes I say or write things not because I think I’ve got a particular issue figured out, but because I want to ask uncomfortable questions of myself and the world around me. With that in mind, then, one of the questions I’ve been asking recently is when the choices I/we make in the name of helping others are more about feeling good than actually doing good.

The advertisement sidebar on my Facebook page tells me that tomorrow Starbucks will be donating 5 cents of the cost of every drink to the (red) campaign. Money for people with AIDS in Africa – it’s a good thing, right?

Maybe. Leaving a discussion of the actual impacts of charity efforts like the (red) campaign aside for a moment, I wonder what they say about us as US consumers. To begin with, there’s the absurdity of using the donation of a few dollars or cents of the profits from a purchase to some worthy cause as an incentive to buy something. The obvious question here is – if you really wanted to help, why not donate the whole $15 cost of your t-shirt?

Okay, so maybe your t-shirt purchase isn’t so much about helping the poor, but if you’re going to buy the shirt anyway, isn’t it better to go for one that will support someone in need? Again, I want to say, “not so fast”. I wonder if by highlighting special opportunities to make particular ethical consumption choices, companies like Apple, Starbucks and the Gap aren’t distracting us from the fact that all our consumer choices have social, political and environmental ramifications in the developing world. Does a dollar or two given back to the communities in Lesotho where (red) t-shirts are made make up for the fact that what you pay for the jeans on the next rack is the same as what the woman who sews them in Cambodia makes in a month? Does a few cents donation from your latte do anything to address the environmental degradation of non-fair trade, non-organic coffee? Though it’s impossible to measure, does the good you do with the occasional contribution to consumer charity outweigh the negatives impact of the product you buy? Of all the non-charity items you get from those companies?

Perhaps my argument is not so much with campaigns like (red) themselves as it is with how the highlight the lack of a bigger conversation about the amount of stuff we buy, where it comes from, and how the earth and other people are treated to get them to us in the first place. At any rate, I don’t think hitting up Starbucks tomorrow will be my way of marking World AIDS day.

life as a duckling

Here's a link to something I wrote about my time in Cambodia that recently got posted:
http://www.servantsasia.org/index.php/news/8-general/419-my-experience-of-entering-a-slum-as-a-learner

Group 78

Last August I started training for the Angkor Wat half-marathon, waking up at 5 am to run a few miles as the sun rose. My favorite loop was around Phnom Penh's riverfront, circling overly-manicured parks where hundreds of people gathered daily to walk, do aerobics, learn karate and practice traditional Chinese sword and fan dances. In a few kilometers my running buddy and I could get to most of the city's tourist attractions: the Royal Palace, the National Museum, the big casino, the home of Phnom Penh's elephant... The end of our run would take us back behind the National Assembly and by a little community called Group 78. The village of wooden homes, some of them with plastic tarps for walls seemed out of place surrounded by the homes, offices and gardens of the wealthy, one of the last remaining pockets of working class residents in downtown Phnom Penh.

Group 78 will most likely be evicted tomorrow. Under Cambodia's 2001 Land Law, the residents are legal owners of the land after occupying it for more than five years. However, like many other communities along the riverfront, their land has been turned over to a local developer and the police are preparing to chase the people from their homes. After the Land Law was put in place, the World Bank began funding the LMAP program to title all the land in Cambodia. At first glance, this should be good news for poor people who, in theory, should have tenure security and be able to harness the value of their land. Things have not always turned out that way, in this case because in order to ensure the cooperation of the Cambodian government, the World Bank has promised to keep its mitts off any disputed land (like Group 78). In all likelihood, these people will lose their homes and their jobs tomorrow in the name of "improving" the Phnom Penh.