Alison Stine Archives - Talk Poverty https://talkpoverty.org/person/alison-stine/ Real People. Real Stories. Real Solutions. Mon, 05 Mar 2018 22:25:43 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://cdn.talkpoverty.org/content/uploads/2016/02/29205224/tp-logo.png Alison Stine Archives - Talk Poverty https://talkpoverty.org/person/alison-stine/ 32 32 Where the Internet Doesn’t Reach https://talkpoverty.org/2016/09/06/internet-doesnt-reach/ Tue, 06 Sep 2016 11:44:44 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=17252 “I don’t mean to alarm you,” my friend said just before I visited her home in the hills of rural, Southeastern Ohio, “but there’s no bathroom out here. There’s no running water.”

And the driveway, she said, was a rutted, steep rise of dirt, holes, and gravel—a quarter-mile long.  “The first test,” as she put it.

When my 15-year-old Honda and I actually made it to the top, she came out in front of her house and waved at me, impressed.  She lived in a converted garage with piles of empty cans and tools in the yard, a chimney trembling with wood smoke.

“A lot of people,” she said, “just turn back.”

Rural poverty seems like something out of a Laura Ingalls Wilder book—something quaint and distant. Something over. But many of my neighbors and family members in Appalachia grew up—or their parents grew up—in homes without running water or indoor plumbing. That kind of living is not a relic from the past. It’s the life of many people today, some of whom I know and love.

Not everyone has the internet.

I stopped assuming my friends would have driveways.  Many of them are homesteading in the deep, ridged woods, or squatting in trailers in fields, or just getting by in overcrowded farmhouses. I stopped assuming they would have bathrooms, trash pickup, or even electricity. Not everyone I know has power—either because the bill hasn’t been paid or the house was never on the grid to begin with; wires never reached that far.

And not everyone has the internet.

Not everyone has high-speed or wireless. Not everyone has a computer, or a smart phone. Or a phone phone. The assumption of basic technology, even in the digital age, is just that: an assumption.

I’m fortunate to have internet at home (usually, when I can pay the bill), but living alone with a 5-year-old child means I don’t get to my freelance work at my computer until late at night, after he’s asleep and I’m exhausted.

Until recently, in order to email a W2—which I have to do regularly, to get paid—I had to drive 20 minutes into town to an office store, pay for parking, and pay a few bucks to print out the pages.

Then a friend gave me her old printer so I can print at home.  But I still have to drive across town to the library, which has a free scanner I can use to scan my W2s—and that’s not a process my son will wait patiently through. So I have to pay for a babysitter, and again pay for parking. The privilege of getting paid for my work costs me about $30 in all, and takes up several hours of limited, much-needed, child-free time.

Most people know about the practice of punishing those who are poor with further financial burdens: deposits for utilities, fees on check-cashing and bank accounts, payday loans. All of this is a kind of a poverty tax—it marks you as undesirable and it helps keep you poor.

But there’s a lesser known poverty tax on technology, and it’s paid with your time.

It takes a lot more time and ingenuity to access technology when you’re poor. It takes calling in favors from friends. It takes being at the mercy of parking and babysitters and business hours and irregular internet access at coffee shops and restaurants.

It takes shelling out a few bucks you don’t have for coffee or food for the privilege of sitting at a business with wireless. It takes feeling incredibly nervous that you’ve been there too long, that they’re going to kick you out or make you buy something else, or that the manager at Wendy’s is going to call the cops because you’ve been sitting in the parking lot for hours—as I have done—trying to use their internet for work.

Politicians talk about providing internet to rural, impoverished communities in grand, noble terms. But the reality is simple and harsh: We need the internet to access help.

I need the internet to get help for child support. I need the internet to search for work and apply for more jobs. Once my child starts school, he will need the internet for homework—a common struggle in my community, since children are required to do hours of homework online every night even though over 300 households in my county don’t have any internet access. Public libraries close a few hours after school lets out, and due to budget cuts, they are not open much on the weekend.

We need the internet to access help.

Most services for the poor are online. Job ads are online. Housing information is online. Information about food pantries, seed distribution, free meals, parenting classes, job fairs, shelters, health clinics, and free activities to do with children are online. Even accessing my bank account—to make sure I’m not overdrawn, to make sure I’m not racking up a low balance fee—needs to be done online. Every time I ask for a copy of my statement at the bank, I’m told: “Do you know you can do this online?”

Yes, I know. Do you know that not everyone has that luxury?  

Stop assuming that everyone has the same technology, the same new phone, the same fast laptop.

Maybe if you realize that, you will stop assuming everyone has other basics: like a hot shower, like a stove to cook a meal, like a fridge to store fruits and vegetables, like dental care, like money for much-needed medications.

What are taken as givens, including technology, are actually extravagances for many people. When you’re poor, applying for a job online, or finding a doctor, or simply answering an email, often takes extra money, time, and luck that you don’t have.

That steep, rocky climb I had to make to reach my friend’s house? I climb it, in so many ways, every day.

 

 

]]>
Why Art Matters, Even in Poverty https://talkpoverty.org/2016/04/18/why-art-matters-even-in-poverty/ https://talkpoverty.org/2016/04/18/why-art-matters-even-in-poverty/#comments Mon, 18 Apr 2016 13:11:10 +0000 http://talkpoverty.org/?p=15640 In the toy aisle, which is inconveniently next to the bread aisle, I tell my 5-year-old son we are not getting a truck today. I tell him we buy what we need, and not more. I tell him I have enough money for food, but nothing else. I tell him I don’t buy treats for myself.

“You buy art supplies,” my son says. And I’m stumped.

Because of course he’s right.

I live in Appalachia, in the poorest county in my state. I often make less in a month than some people spend on cable, though my son and I don’t have cable. We don’t always have trash collection. I drive a 15-year-old car with dents in the back and a scrape on the side that will never get fixed, and I’m behind on medical bills.

But I do buy art supplies.

One of my first memories is of drawing. I’m sitting below the table while my parents have dinner; I’m drawing their portraits. Outside, rural Indiana is flat and abandoned. Our road is gravel. Our neighbors have trailers. But in the warmth of the kitchen, I draw and dream.

I don’t remember being specifically encouraged in art as a child, but I was encouraged to be creative. I was encouraged to occupy myself. I was told, when I complained to my mother that I was bored, “Is your imagination broken?”

When I became a mother—and then, a solo mother—I found myself saying the same words to my son. I filled an old suitcase with art supplies, and put the suitcase in the living room. Mostly, I did it to distract him, to gain a few minutes so I could fold laundry, or start dinner.

But something happened: my child came to love art.

A few years ago, I took him to a “First Friday” event, a street fair when the stores—those that are still in business—stay open late, and there are hot dogs and a high school band. Kids were playing in a fountain, but my kid started sobbing. Because he wanted to see paintings. He had heard me mention an art gallery—and he had to see the paintings there.

My son became enamored with paintings after seeing the art I make at night after he’s asleep. Most nights I fall asleep working as a freelance reporter, drifting off over my laptop, but some mornings, it’s paper and paint pens that litter the quilt when he wanders into my room. He holds the images up. He has questions. He has favorites, and constructive criticism.

What is living in poverty if not constantly being creative?

Not long ago, in the midst of making what I thought was a couch fort, he made his own art gallery. He turned the biggest cushion on its side and taped up his creations to the fabric. He’s also done an “installation” in which he taped greeting cards, string, an odd piece of paper from a grocery bag he cut out himself, and small toys to the wall. He did this after seeing me arrange my own postcards on the wall of our rented place, to cover a water stain.

Why is it important to have art even in poverty? Why is it important to make it? Why spend time trying to make things look nice?

My child is observant—he knows we struggle—and is prone to worry. It’s just clothes, I tell him when he has a play date that will end in mud and wet grass. It’s okay if they get dirty. That means you’re having fun.

Fun is okay, I tell myself. It’s okay to be happy. It’s okay not to spend every second working. It’s okay not to spend every second worrying. It’s okay to forget sometimes—briefly—the creditors on the answering machine, the possibility that we might have to move again, my cough that I can’t afford to get checked out.

Why do I bother making things?

One of my jobs as a poor mother is to make things, to stretch the laundry detergent with water, to fit the screws back in the car door with wire. What is living in poverty if not constantly being creative? Continually making it work? Making the unbearable, bearable. Making the money last. Making the unlivable not just livable, but survivable.

So I cover up scuffs in shoes with marker. I use baking soda to wash my face. Every leftover portion from dinner, I carefully wrap and freeze.

Self-sufficiency is a hallmark of Appalachian life, as is DIY ingenuity. Everything is jerry-rigged, slapped or duct-taped together. One Christmas, my friend helped me chop a tiny evergreen, but when I got it home, I realized I had nothing to put it in. So I filled a pot with water, propped the tree in it, and secured it to the pot handles with rubber bands. Appalachian tree stand.

That’s the descriptor for what we do—and it’s a brand of honor. Appalachian tanning bed: a blanket in the sun. Appalachian recycling bin: throw your empties out the window.

There is more to this life than struggle; there is also great love. I learned that when my son was a newborn, and the knocks on the door began: strangers with mason jars of soup and trays of rice and beans. I learned it when my son was a toddler, and a friend’s father gave him a bicycle and spent hours helping me teach him to ride.

Living in Appalachia, being surrounded by people who are the kindest, most generous I have ever met, even though they have the least, has allowed me to find a way when it seemed there was no way. It has made me feel strong and capable at the hardest points of my life. It has also allowed me to give. When I feel like I have nothing, I can give my son the gift of creativity, the gift of imagination, the gift of spending a happy hour painting cardboard on the porch.

Yes, the porch is splintered, and it doesn’t belong to us, and we don’t own the land—we don’t own any land, not yet—but the paint is bright, the colors are true, and my son smiles.

]]>
https://talkpoverty.org/2016/04/18/why-art-matters-even-in-poverty/feed/ 1