My internship for the past month has been with a small non-profit Christian organization that operates solely off of the generosity of donors. The mission of my agency is to fulfill the scripture, “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I was naked and you clothed me…” (Matthew 25). This non-profit offers anyone in need a weekly food box as well as a access to medical care and discounted/free clothing.

An observation that I have made about this organization is how diverse the people who volunteer there are. Everyone from homeless community members to college students is there donating their time and service to this facility. I believe that this is because unlike other charity organizations, this one does not require any prior training or a background check to volunteer. The agency is happy for any and all help, whether or not you are offering this just once or every Saturday for a year. This is particularly helpful for individuals in need of the organization’s services who who would rather work for what they receive instead of getting what they might consider to be a “hand-out.” This charity does not discriminate in any way, shape, or form and is willing to help every person who walks through the door regardless of their race, religious affiliation, age, gender, or lifestyle choices.

One of the major questions that I had after my first day of interning there was where was all of this food coming from? The amounts of bread, meat, sweets, and dairy products were so vast that I could not imagine that this was the result of families cleaning out their pantries. I was able to speak to one of the heads of the organization and he elucidated that the food available to fill the food boxes is donated by local grocery stores that instead of throwing out surplus items or products that aren’t profitable give the food to the agency to help the hungry. Without these businesses donating their unwanted food, the agency wouldn’t be able to distribute food boxes to local people in need every Saturday.
I did notice, however, that because all of the food is donated, the organization cannot always ensure that there will be enough of each different food group to put in the boxes. For example, near the end of one of the shifts, the only items I had left in abundance were bread and sweet products. There were still three families patiently awaiting a box and all I had left to give them were cupcakes, cookies, rolls, eggs, and several loaves of white bread. Tragically, while these food boxes offer people something to eat when they would otherwise have to go without, the boxes are not always healthy or nourishing. This is particularly concerning when the families have children whose diets are more demanding of proper nutrition in order to grow properly. While the agency tries its best to provide its clients with a well-balanced box, due to a lack of resources they can’t always do this. This is representative of one of the many challenges that non-profit organizations face.

After presenting to the class the ethnographic work of Kim Hooper, “Reckoning with Homelessness”, it gave me a broad understanding of the rise of homelessness in the United States and the historical context of the high rates of homeless men.  Hopper argues in his book that most written ethnographies lack the reliability of the problem-solving by providing a numerous of facts that has been embarked through history, yet the solutions are not being brought to the attention of the people to deter homelessness.  In his work, Hopper persuades us to understand his structural method with solutions advocated to solve the issue of homelessness and the need to develop organizations for the people to restore the country.

Hopper’s fieldwork define the frameworks of homelessness aggressively to present the failures and improvements the government has assisted in terms of relief.  In his efforts to focus and recognized this problem as a chronic issue grounded by the lack of public assistance and mental illness, Hopper help fund the National Coalition for the Homelessness.  Through his research he continues to distribute social policy and anthropology to help us understand that homelessness is a complex issue where the population varies, and the need to adopt new methods to resolve the issue can establish stability in our country gracefully.

I was reading the Huffington Post today and came across some interesting information that I thought pertained to this class. It was about the aftermath of a decisions made my conservative Texas legislators to cut the funding of family planning clinics by two-thirds. I was first off shocked by the decisions to cut that much funding. I truly blows my mind when government officials and political figures decide that family planning and assistance is something worth taking out of our budget. What didn’t surprise me however, was that the first demographic that was negatively effected by this was women. This particular budget cut wasn’t just taking away families’ abilities to get services and plan their futures in a constructive way, but it took away major health assistance for women (i.e. contraceptives, pap smears, cancer treatments, etc.) It then described in the article how Latina women living in the Rio Grande Valley were effected. What initially broke my heart for these women was that the original goal of this budget cut was to ensure that the efforts of Planned Parenthood were stifled. But, as this typically turns out, when you take away the access for women to properly understand and take care of their own bodies, then women’s bodies are the first ones to be negatively influenced. So much in this particular case, that it has been determined as an infringement on these women’s humans rights. They no longer have access to testing for sexually transmitted diseases, for basic checkups regarding their health, abortions etc. Without these forms of assistance these women are not only susceptible to becoming extremely ill, but are also now exposed to unexpected pregnancy and other issues relating to their sexual health that could deeply effect heir lives. This made me think about the homeless mothers in book that I read for our last assignment. Im sure those women could have had the information and assistance to make better choices regarding their sexual wellbeing and physical health had they had the information of how to be safe and how to advocate for themselves. It also connects to the book that I am reading now that deals specifically with policies. Without these resources that were taken away in the budget cuts, there has been a drastic reduction in condom use, women re having to chose between getting check ups and feeding there family, etc. These are choices that people shouldn’t have to make and are inevitably the ones that can send force a person into homelessness. What I mean by this is that if a mother falls sick because she couldn’t get a checkup on time, she cannot work and then her family can lose their income. If a mother has an unexpected pregnancy and she cannot afford to take care of another child, that could also lead to homelessness. There are plenty of ways in which taking the rights that women have to education, protection and care of their bodies can effect their overall quality of life. I was heartbroken by stories in the article and was exceedingly sad for these women. However, I was happy to see that there are still come women who are meeting up with one another to discuss their reproductive rights. I think that the empowerment that these women are still seeking to provide themselves and each other with is proof of how resilient women are, however I don’t think that they should be forced into providing it for themselves, or forced into thinking that they are the only ones that care about their reproductive rights. Women should be a priority of our society and yet we remain a particularly undervalued group in most of the world. In the same way that we have been discussing that to understand homelessness is to help end homelessness, to understand the reality of these women’s lives and what they need is to help end the oppression that they are facing on a day to day basis They do not deserve to have their rights taken away from them in regards to their knowledge of their bodies and the rights provided for their bodies. More or less what I meant to say through this post was that I am now starting to see that ways in which people need to start thinking more about one another. We need to think about the homeless, we need to think about impoverished and under supported women, etc. We just need to keep each other in mind when we make drastic policy and funding cuts and we need to think about who is truly going to be affected and to what degrees.

post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/26/nuestro-texas-rio-grande-valley-report_n_4849754.html

The book I received for my second group presentation was about the history of homelessness. There were a lot of connections in there that i’ve never made. I guess the most striking one to me is that I never considered vagabonds or hobos to be homeless in a sense, I almost always viewed them as a Gypsy type person who travels around and that is there thing, and not that they dont have a home so they have to wonder. There is also a really big distinction from how they were displayed as homeless to what we have now. Looking through the book, back in the times of vagabonds and hobos, the people were treated almost as subhuman. They were looked at incredibly cruelly, especially in the 1870s, with people wanting them beaten or killed because of what they did and how they were, and even before that they were looked at as incredibly immoral people. I’m glad most of shave empathy now towards them, you still hear some social Darwinist comments about homeless, but at least its not comments about flogging them or killing them.