If you learned to play the original Dungeons and Dragons in
the 1970s with an anal-retentive dungeon master – the kind who would plunge you
into darkness if you mistakenly drew your sword without first telling him that
you were carefully placing your torch in a wall bracket – you might be pretty
good at playing CAPS, the Community Action Poverty Simulation.
Last week my friend Susan, a fellow “church rat” and member
of the vestry at Trinity Episcopal Church in Indianapolis, invited me to
participate in an educational offering, sponsored by a pair of local
non-profits -- the Domestic Violence Network and the Julian Center – utilizing
a pretty remarkable Role-Playing Game developed by the Missouri Association for Community Action.
Susan and I were on the invitation list because we’re
active in several of the feeding ministries and other outreach activities that
Trinity sponsors in our inner-city neighborhood. Susan’s husband, a judge, had been through
the experience, along with his staff, and recommended it.
So on Tuesday morning I joined about 60 other people –
all but seven of them women – in the community room of Tabernacle Presbyterian
Church; was given a randomly-assigned role to play, and met my “family” to hear
our instructions. In this simulation,
most of us play members of one of about a dozen families – some adults, some
children; some working, some unemployed, some retired, some disabled. The rest of the group played the staff of
the various businesses and community organizations with which we would
interact: grocery stores, banks and
pay-day loan centers; government agencies and police stations; utility
companies and pawn shops.
I was assigned the role of the 36-year-old wife in a
household where my husband had a $313/week job. We
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had a 15-year-old daughter in school, and my disabled
father living with us – until moments before the game began, when my husband’s
mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and came to live with us as well.
The simulation itself took exactly one hour to do – four
15-minute “weeks” -- in which we dealt with the known and unexpected challenges
of our lives. Each 15-minute week was divided into eight
minutes of work and school, where the employed and the students went to their
“assignments,” while the rest of us dealt with paying bills, buying groceries
and prescriptions, getting to the bank, getting our food stamps renewed (in my
case, while juggling a pair of seniors with limited mobility) and making sure
that every member of the family had a supply of the ever-important
transportation tickets that had to be cashed in at the start of every
transaction at every venue. Then we had
a seven-minute “weekend” to strategize and prioritize the coming week.
Our family got behind the eight ball immediately when my "husband" (paternalistic driver that he
is!) responded to the sudden arrival of his dementia-ridden mother by taking
her out the door with him and dropping her at an adult day care which we
couldn’t afford on his way to work – despite the fact that we had two other
adults at home. He also left the rest of
us without enough transportation tickets to go everywhere that we needed to go
in the next eight minutes.
I went into take-charge mode myself, taking my “father”
to the bank with me to cash his disability check; and drawing his ire for
agreeing to pay the entire car loan out of the proceeds, instead of trying to
negotiate a partial payment.
By the first “weekend,” we were snapping at each other,
even though we didn’t know each other and were only playing a game.
Of course, the “game” was stacked against us, although
some would argue “no less than it is stacked against the poor in real
life.” In the second week I got a summons
from the welfare department and after two trips there to collect the necessary
documentation, I learned that my father’s disability check was going to reduce
our eligibility for food stamps. Not
that I had time to get to the grocery every week anyway. I learned that my father had a checking
account at the bank, but my husband did not – and we never had a week to wait
to open one, so had to keep going to the payday loan store to cash paychecks,
for an ever-increasing fee. Almost
everywhere we went, the people “playing” the staff made us wait precious
seconds while they completed conversations with each other.
I deal with anxiety in real life, and 35 minutes into
this game I was thinking it might be better for my health to just quit.
Our “family” came out rather well. We never lost a job for being late twice; we
weren’t evicted; our teenager got a job during “spring break” and was able to
pay most of the cost for the glasses she needed, and we never had to bail her
out of juvenile detention. We missed a
payment and got our phone disconnected.
We actually had a second car that we could have sold, if we had the
time.
During an hour-long debriefing session, I didn’t even get
a chance to share my observations because so many people were so eager to talk
about their experiences. And I’m not
pushy enough. I’m a
line-waiter-inner.
One of the observations I made of myself – and my entire
family of middle-class role-players – was that it never occurred to us to try
to bend the rules or even ask for help.
The system has usually worked for me.
Not only did I not lie on my food-stamp paperwork; it certainly didn’t
occur to me to rob the pawn shop. Nor
did it occur to any of us to try to barter services with other families. We had two adults at home, taking turns
taking care of an Alzheimer’s patient.
The families around us had disabled family members and pre-teen
children. Finding the time to seek them
out and trade services for cash or goods didn’t occur to us. It did occur to me to try to find a job, but
the game didn’t allow the time for that.
The reason for this, and perhaps the central “takeaway”
of the whole exercise, was summed up in the often-used phrase “the tyranny of
the moment.” The game is designed,
above all else, to illustrate that being working poor is a full-time job for
each member of the family. It is too
easy for our society to blame the poor for their condition – to ascribe it to
laziness or bad choices. In this simulation, the choices are made in a
framework of urgency. I didn’t choose
to not have a bank account – it was just a daily matter of preventing the
electricity from being turned off being more urgent.
I wasn’t able to get a complete roster, but everyone I
talked to at this event was associated with a hospital, a government agency, a
non-profit, or a church – people who work with the poor on a regular basis, and
at least have a need, if not a pre-disposition, to understand their
motives. And again, fifty-three of the sixty
participants were women. I couldn’t
help wondering what might have been different if I had participated along with
a room full of 55-year-old male bankers and insurance executives.
I also volunteer as a mentor with Starfish Initiative. Because of our mission –
helping disadvantaged youth qualify for college scholarships – one of
requirements of being a mentor is to have a college degree. So we have a good cross-section of educated
and successful people, across the political spectrum. Starfish encourages its mentors to read a
book, Ruby Payne's A Framework for Understanding Poverty, which discusses the different ways that the poor and the middle class
evaluate and value basics such as food and money. (For instance, whereas the middle class may
ask of a meal, “Was it tasty? Was it
healthy?”, the poor are likely to evaluate it in terms of “Did you get enough?”) Starfish doesn’t promote this book to turn
us into socialists, but to help us understand the background of our kids –
including the fact that their parents may not be lazy or stupid, but just have
different, and understandably different, immediate priorities.
Yes, the simulation is a bit heavy-handed, which could be
used as the excuse to dismiss it by someone not predisposed to be
sympathetic. Which might be a good
reason for a community like a church – with a range of ages and professions
represented – to be a place that demonstrates it.
