Today I went to the Long Island Homeless Shelter to do volunteer work. I went because it was a corporate event, and since all my colleagues are going, I thought why not. The kind of work we did there probably does not come as a surprise to anyone. Volunteering is a rather well-known activity and probably most people have done it at least once in their lives. In this case we painted hallways and scrubbed the walls of large sleep quarters that reminded me of a military barrack. Nothing unusual really. At lunch time the organizer gave us a speech on what it was like to be homeless. Her tone suggested that she believed we had no idea what a homeless person is like, which was true. But I wonder if it was really necessary for her to put herself on a higher level of understanding and talk down to us. "You think homeless people are middle-aged white alcoholics. You are wrong. And you are an ignorant fool to think that. Homeless people are mostly children." Well, she didn't say it in those exact words but that was kind of what I was hearing. Then after she was satisfied with her expert status on the demographics of homeless people, she proceeded to describe to us why it was so difficult for them to make a living. I sat there and listened politely for the entire half hour. At some point during the speech, it struck me. This woman has never been poor. Whatever credibility she was able to build for herself in the beginning by talking big picture, she loss later on in going through the details. Just take personal finance as an example. Supposedly an average person need $500 a month for heating. Really? I don't consider myself in extreme poverty, but my heating bill at worst is $200. Most of the time I choose to turn the heat off and wear a coat instead (yes I learned this from my parents). And what about cable TV for $50 a month? Strange that I never thought about it as a necessity. But if you want tv entertainment, all you really need is a used antennae, which you can buy off of someone's yard sale or a flee market for 5 bucks. How come this option didn't occur to this woman? Maybe because she has never had to do this before. And the list goes on from housing to public transportation (according to her, one cannot live other than in Boston driving a car). Also according to her, homeless people need vocational training to get a job. Many blue collar jobs pay better than white collar jobs and hardly need training at all. I thought about what she was doing here, solving a problem she doesn't fully understand. Then I thought about what we were doing here, choosing to do only the chores that were pleasant (although we did run into vomits on the walls, which we decided that for those areas the walls can clean themselves). Perhaps in the end this is all a show. We're here to "show" that we care about the community and she is probably here to do the same. | 
