Vaunda Brown: Forever Homeless
Kara Bender and Kelly Smucker participate in last night's Poverty Simulation in the Campus Center.
"I am a homeless, helpless, hopeless woman," said Vaunda Brown, a social worker, business owner, woman of faith, and formerly homeless person, in Wednesday morning's chapel.
As a kick-off to Poverty Awareness Week, Brown told her life story. Brown left home as a teen to escape an abusive stepfather; she relied on the help of a Christian shelter. Through a series of "lucky" events, she slowly made a return to a life of prayer and faith that she had lost during the lowest points of her life. Brown now calls the shelter and its Christian influences "blessings" and she seeks to bless other people as a volunteer in soup kitchens. Brown also operates a hospice program, and she helps her tenants to become homeowners. Yet with all the success Brown has had, she still identifies herself as homeless person. The issue of poverty is complex.
To help students and faculty understand poverty a little better, professor Terry Jantzi hosted a poverty simulation and hunger banquet on Wednesday evening. Approximately twenty students participated, each with the goal of performing well enough in the simulation to buy a substantial dinner. The students were given poker chips with a point value and instructed to trade chips to earn more points. As the game progressed, those with more points were given advantages, such as the power to introduce their own rules into the game. These "rich" rule-makers seized this opportunity to exploit their fellow players. The results of the game were not surprising to for the professor.
Jantzi later reported that he has only heard of one group that has made rules that benefit all the players; that group was composed of nuns. The students, none of which are nuns, used the chips they had gathered to purchase either a full-course meal of lasagna, salad, bread, and dessert, rice and beans, or a seat on the floor with a cup of rice.
Both of Wednesday's events highlighted the ever-current issues of status and privilege. Though Brown is by all appearances an intelligent and generous woman, she was perceived as lazy and irresponsible while she was a homeless person. Jantzi's simulation is also an example of this way of think. The losers in the simulation simulation were told they were failures because they lacked motivation, and that they could improve their situation if they just tried. Judgments are easy to come by, yet these examples ask us to take a deeper look at the causes of poverty and our role in creating it.
Poverty Awareness Week activities will continue until next Wednesday, and are building up to an evening with writer Jim Wallis on Tuesday, February 21.
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