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Mike Patton, portraying a teacher/administrator, offers help to “students” during the poverty simulation exercise.

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Getting the picture

by Roger Mannon
Staff Writer

Emily Epperman, 31, is trying to raise two teenagers after her husband left. The 15-year-old daughter is hanging with the wrong crowd, and the 14-year-old son doesn’t like school.
Teila Tiskit is an 85-year-old woman living alone, with no resources except for a monthly social security check.
The Garafalo family consists of a 25-year-old unemployed father, a 19-year-old working mother, and a one-year-old child.
None of these family situations are real. They were, along with several other imaginary family alignments, part of the poverty simulation exercise, held at the Floyd Baptist Church fellowship hall Wednesday, October 17.
The exercise was conducted by the Virginia Cooperative Extension office in Floyd. It was designed to give participants from above the federal poverty line of family income a brief, but powerful taste of what it is like to live in poverty.
The volunteers were assigned family roles. The task of each family was to provide for basic necessities and shelter during the course of the simulation. Each family’s month of struggles was compressed into four “weeks” of approximately ten minutes.
Also participating in the simulation were volunteers who represented a utility collector, grocer, school teacher/administrator, banker, social services, payday lender and pawnbroker.
Families struggled with mortgage, rent and utility payments. Some families had to pawn their belongings.
In addition to the problems of balancing a budget were the “luck of the draw” cards, which brought additional calamities.
Dawn Barnes, extension agent, said there are 38 million Americans living in poverty. She said in other simulations such as this one, emotions can be intense. “One person said ‘this is exactly what I lived through.’ Another man became so upset, he walked away from the simulation in ‘week two.’ People deal with things differently.”
Karen Hodges, town clerk, played the role of Big Dave, a pawnbroker who also was a drug dealer. She offered clients as little as ten cents on the dollar for their cameras and televisions. “At first everyone turned down my offers, but then they started taking anything,” she noted.
Lucy Brizendine, in real life a foster and adoptive parent recruiter for the Department of Social Services, portrayed the three-year old son in the Nattin family; a father and three children, age 13, eight and three. “It was difficult for this family to pay the bills,” she said. “There were several choices, none of them good. The father was working, but the day care closed and the family had to have one of the children stay out of school to baby sit.
“It was tough to watch him struggle, because he couldn’t get it all done,” she added.” That is a reality for a lot of the families we deal with (in Social Services).”
County supervisor Diane Belcher was a single mom with two teens. “We were just pulled in every direction. There was no time to be together as a family.”
John McEnhill of the Jacksonville Center was the octogenarian living on social security. “There were no options for me. I had to turn to crime.”
The simulation was designed by the Missouri Community Action Program.
One participant noted “we can walk out of here back to our own lives, but the poor are going to wake up tomorrow still in poverty.”