Cul-de-sac

Yesterday, Eddie - a 37-year-old homeless African-American - was walking towards the shuttle stop with me after my afternoon of volunteering at the homeless reception centre in our neighbourhood (www.cchfp.org). The shuttle was just leaving as we got there so we went into the sitting area of Whole Foods to chat for a while. During our hour of conversation I learnt so much! He just opened up to me way more than when we're at the center in a group.

Sometimes I wonder if my volunteering at this place is really worthwhile, and that afternoon totally justified it again for me: you have to have seemingly meaningless conversations and basically just be present in a given communal area for a certain amount of time in order to "prove yourself" and establish mutual trust before people will really open up to you and your relationships start to become more mutually beneficial.

So Eddie had told me before how he worked in contruction since he was 15 and used to have a nice appartment and three cars; and how one day he just got burnt out from the strenuous physical work and stopped, eventually becoming homeless; and how - now he says - the worst thing is to have nothing to do all day; and how he was going to get another job soon (in fact he has been doing day labour on and off when the weather isn't too bad); but I was never really clear on what was keeping him from getting back to work (except "pereza", as we say in Spanish, which is approximately "laziness"/"just not feeling like doing something" in English).

Of course, talking to a homeless, unemployed person about why they don't have a job is a bit of a delicate subject, but yesterday, during our fascinating conversation about race relations in the USA, the truth came out.

It's simple: since MLK and Malcom X, wages for trades in which African-Americans typically worked (e.g. brick layers) were on the rise (at least matching inflation). It seems like African-Americans had a sort of monopoly over these jobs and they figured out that if they didn't compete too much with each other and all refused to work for a less than a certain amount, their White foremen would just have to comply.

But then the 12 million Latinos came along - more in fact, since that number is only undocumented immigrants! And of course, they would work for less. According to Eddie, they could afford to do this because culturally, they could live more people in one appartment than African-Americans.

And so now, Eddie makes the same $50 a day that he did when he was 15 - and for what?! It's not enough to save up anything after living expenses; it simply replaces the things he has now learned to get for free: food (and not just junk), shelter, even movie passes, apparently! So despite the positive feeling of having had a productive day of work, working is also sort of degrading (most White foremen will pay a White labourer twice what they would an African-American or a Latino) and doesn't offer any benefits to being unemployed here.

That's the way my buddy Eddie told it to me anyhow. It sort of reminds me of the discussions that go on here about jails: if the conditions become too liveable, homeless people will try to get in jail to get off the street...