Hawi Awash, a 21-year-old senior at Dominican University in San Rafael, was born in Ethiopia in a family of 11 children. When she was 2, the family left their homeland and ended up in a refugee camp in Kenya. So she knows what poverty and hardship feels like. She also knows that there are people worse off than she was.
“There was a little girl outside the refugee camp gate with a disabled mother who couldn’t work,” she said. “She was constantly begging for money, and one day when my mother sent me to the store to buy sugar, I gave her the change I was given even though I didn’t have much myself. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to grow up and help people in poverty.”
For her senior thesis, she used money from a scholarship she won to sponsor a poverty simulation at Dominican for students, faculty and members of the community. On Friday morning, some 50 people gathered in a virtual community that had been set up in Guzman Hall on campus to play the role of 26 different impoverished families, including an unemployed single mother, seniors on Social Security, grandparents raising grandchildren and others balancing on the edge of homelessness.
“I’m doing this to give people a different perspective,” Awash said. “A lot of times homelessness is attached to an identity. But I want people to understand that it’s circumstances that lead you to homelessness.”
For the simulation, participants broke into family groups and had to take on the economic and social challenges of those families as they are outlined in a poverty kit.
“They are living the life on that person in that kit,” Awash said.
Fifteen minute blocks of time represented a month in the lives of these families. Kids had to go to school, parents had to have transportation passes to get to their jobs. Some of them had to go to a virtual pawn shop to hock whatever valuables they had to pay their mortgage and buy food. A bank was there to foreclose on those who didn’t. Anyone caught operating outside the law was sent to jail.
Streets Team
Members of the Downtown Streets Team, a nonprofit dedicated to ending homelessness through employment, played the role of the various institutions and commercial establishments, including a Walmart-like super store, a police department, a school, utility company, employer, child-care facility and homeless shelter, among many others.
“We want people to get a sense of the urgency and the chaos, how much time is an enemy when you’re living in poverty,” said Marianna Moles, communications and outreach specialist for the Downtown Streets Team. “You have to be able to do all these things — go to work, take care of your kids, pay your bills — in a limited amount of time. That’s why time is your enemy when you’re homeless.”
Kathy Takemoto, a 62-year-old adult education program coordinator for San Rafael City Schools, played the role of a 42-year-old unemployed man with three kids and a wife with a part-time job.
“I think a lot of the adults that we serve are facing a lot of these issues,” she said as she sat in her virtual home, unable to go look for a job without enough money for transportation. “I’m here all by myself trying to get a job. It’s not easy.”
Hallie Balch, a 20-year-old Dominican student, played the part of a 10-year-old boy whose 8-year-old brother had been sent to juvenile hall for bringing a weapon to school.
“I got into a fight so I’m not going to school next week either,” she said.
‘Compassion’
Mayra Perez, 54, deputy superintendent of San Rafael City Schools, played her pregnant, 16-year-old sister.
“This is really about empathy and compassion,” Perez said. “To know the experiences some of our students are going through helps us in serving the community.”
Suresh Appavoo, a Fulbright scholar and dean of diversity and equity at Dominican, was having a hard time making ends meet as a man with a low-paying job and a girlfriend with a year-old son.
“It’s frantic,” he said. “There’s not enough time to get to all the places I need to go to and not enough money to pay all of the things I have to pay.”
In real life, Appavoo comes from a middle-class family in India whose circumstances would be considered low-income by American standards.
“This simulation reminds me of where I came from and what it took to get where I am,” he said. “And, also, in a very direct way, to reiterate and reinforce how I constantly need to be more compassionate and not get sucked into thinking, ‘OK, I made it, now I’m free and to hell with everybody else.’ It renews and rejuvenates your humanity.”
