Poverty simulation opens eyes

Imagine you are the father of a family of five, and after an extended layoff you, you are out of unemployment benefits.

Your 16-year-old daughter is six months pregnant, and no one in the family has health insurance.

You start the month $200 in the hole. How will you make the bills? get the prenatal care she needs?

For a group of area residents, they did not have to imagine; they got a chance for it to see it all play out during a poverty simulation sponsored by the Circles Initiative, Peace Connections and the Mid-Kansas Community Action Program.

Participants in the simulation were assigned to families. They played the parts of mothers, fathers, children and grandparents.

Participants said the exercise opened their eyes to the plight of the poor.

“If the poor are treated like this in real life, as we are being treated here, it’s tough,” said Eli Bontrager of Newton.

Each family had a budget, had opportunities to use community resources to improve their circumstances and had unexpected life circumstances thrown in their path.

The mock families had to try to play out a month’s worth of working, school, paying bills and buying groceries.

Two of the families in the simulation had their homes foreclosed on. The group learned later the simulated foreclosures had been done illegally because the mortgage company had not used the court system to exercise the evictions. Two families were robbed. Others had to deal with crime and illness.

The participants in the simulation expressed their frustrations at long lines and complex forms to fill out for assistance.

“I had a sense of frustration,” Jan Saab of Newton said. “It seemed as if we were doing everything correctly, and everything was falling apart on us.

“My brother didn’t think my mother was using her time wisely, but my feeling was there were not enough hours in the day to get everything done.”

Marion Kesler, Mid-Kansas Community Action Program director, said her agency has 15 to 20 people coming in each day to apply for emergency assistance, and they did not have the staff to deal with them.

She said the agency was making appointments and asking applications to come back to the office.

Another participant noted most of the social service agencies were open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., but if people spent their days applying for assistance, they had no time to apply for work.

“I was a father whose unemployment had run out. I didn’t have any minutes to look for work. It took time to go from place to place to apply for services,” said Vicki Adame´, participant and Santa Fe Middle School principal.

Even with assistance, families still struggled to pay bills and fulfill their families’ needs.

“I was feeling desperate. By the end of the month, we were out of money and food stamps,” said Cheyl Jefferson Bell of Newton.

The volunteers also expressed concerns about how the financial struggles affected their fictional families.

Barbara Bunting, simulation participant and Newton school board member, played the part of a child.

“Initially I heard the parents talking about the financial problems. I felt a lack of security. I wanted to do something to help.”

Bunting spent part of the simulation in juvenile detention, and she said the experience was more stable than the home environment.

“At least being incarcerated we had a schedule and television and food,” Bunting said.

Bunting also noted the teacher had been a constant for her character during her family’s time of turmoil.

“As a child, my parents couldn’t attend to me. The constant was my teacher, who could give me credit for the positive things I did.”

Kesler noted the financial profiles for the mock families in the simulation were not extremely low income. She said she wanted the participants to understand how easy it can be for families to fall out of the middle class.

“We are seeing more and more people laid off and seeing more and more people changing class,” she said.