The Experiment in Frugal Living

I'm a VISTA volunteer. That means many things-- some simply personal to me, others Federal policy-- but the general idea is that you spend a year or two dedicated fighting poverty by building up a local grassroots organization. This is not a job where we play with the kids in the day care center or we serve up the food at the soup kitchen. This is the job where we create the day care center, find an advisory board, work on structure, publicity, fund raising, volunteer recruitment and then move on to another project.

I work at West End Ministries in High Point, NC as a technology maven. Last year, I created a computer school, started a paper and online newsletter, redid the web site, instituted an eBay store, populated a free but well-designed database with mailing addresses, emails and donations, and served as the organization's technology director.

But something has been bothering me all along. The basic premise of both the Peace Corps and the VISTA project is that one lives in the communities one is serving, at the poverty level of the folks one is serving. Okay, you could say that I live in what we euphemistically call "core city," meaning the poor parts of town. My house is in the geographic region and we do have some problem houses around us as well as a burgeoning gang issue...but it isn't the West End.

So after a lot of soul-searching and waffling, I've decided to go live in the West End on the salary I make. I make $800 a month. Eight hundred. Last year I used my salary to take me back to one of my favorite regions of the world, Nepal and the Himalayan mountains of India, where I worked with several nonprofit organizations to bring technology to bear on their missions-- web sites for a disability organization and documentation of a Rotary Club health camp (funded by my own nonprofit organization, Worlds Touch), with photographs and videos of local doctors donating a day of their time to the people of a remote village far from any medical care whatsoever.

This year, I want to take four months of my service with VISTA to live in the West End and manage on the money I make.

"So you want to find a place for $800 a month? " asked Diane Westmoreland of S.H.A.R.E. of NC, an agency dedicated to providing affordable housing in our town. Diane was the first person I called to start a search for housing I could afford on my salary. "It will be difficult, but we can probably help you find something."

"Oh, no," I told her. "I have $800 for EVERYTHING. Housing, food, transportation, utilities. Everything."

"But your husband will contribute, right?" She knows my husband is a college professor at the local university.

"No! That's the whole idea. I want to see if I can live on my salary."

Actually, I want more than that. I want to see if I can do it AND create a bond with my neighbors...I want to build community, something I found devilishly difficult last year. We got that computer school off the ground, but we don't have any community members on the advisory board, and this summer I lost the only community member who was teaching in the school. She's taken over the child care of her neice's boy and has to be home in the evenings. We give a neighborhood association meeting and nobody comes...or, more accurately, the usually ten suspects show up. We walk the streets, knocking on doors, and everybody seems closed up, locked in and suspicious...or apathetic...or, well, stoned or drunk or both.

"But that's a terrible neighborhood!" I've already heard four times.

No it isn't. It's a neighborhood where there are lots of transients, where people land on the way down or the way up on the social scale, where there used to be a steady solid blue collar furniture industry worker population but the furniture industry has moved to China. It's an old story, neighborhood blight, deterioration. West End Ministries has been fighting -- and making some progress -- the downhill slide of this neighborhood. I want to spotlight the neighborhood with this experiment, to focus on the problems of living on a miniscule budget there, and to challenge myself and my neighbors to grab more LIFE, even on less MONEY.

I don't pretend that I am without a safety net. I have advantages, many many of them, that my less fortunate neighbors do not. I have a job. I have health insurance (albeit only if I get sick, not the "wellness" approach.) I have a place to get away for the weekends (my regular house.) And I have years and years of frugal traveling and frugal living experience under my belt, having CHOSEN that way of life. It makes a big difference, and I know this, if you don't have a choice. Of course, I also believe that all of us have more choices than we generally see, and I'm no exception.

Tomorrow: First problem: Housing.

Comments

[Heartsong]

I'll look in on you here after I return from my family reunion and visit with my daughter. This looks like an interesting experiment Trish.