Whenever you are tackling a complex project with a brand new group of people, encouraging group cohesion is a must, and that's what we've done so far on our journey. Not only have we played endless car games to facilitate bonding time and pass the long hours on the road, but we have also participated in multiple ice breakers to find common interests and learn more about one another. As a group, we have already grown closer together as friends and companions, and we look forward to making a difference together.
In our second official team meeting of the trip, we were asked one simple question: "Why is Sam poor?" With no further prompting or background information, we proceeded to brainstorm on possible reasons that Sam, a generic idea of your average urban individual, was poor. In our small groups, we came up with four broad topics: Lack of Education, Family Issues, Excessive Debt, or Impaired by a Disability. Alex, one of our trip leaders, shuffled the topics between the four groups and asked us to dig deeper - Why didn't Sam have a proper education? Why had he accumulated so much debt? What caused him to be impaired by a disability?
After a few minutes of expanding on these topics, we came back together as a group and shared our findings. As each group listed off the possible chain of events that could have lead to Sam's poverty, the moral of the story quickly became clear - Poverty can be affected by anything and everything. What kind of family you grow up with, what kind of education you receive, what financial resources are available to you, what your physical and mental condition is, EVERYTHING about your life can positively or negatively impact the distance between you and the poverty line. Each event in your life is connected to another, and they all comes together to create your social and economic status.
What does this mean for us? As a volunteer force, our goal is to become an event in people's lives that breaks the cycle of poverty - we are here to move the events in a person's life in a positive direction with our unexpected and and unsolicited assistance. We are here to move the time, money, and energy that might have been spent on attaining food towards higher goals and aspirations, such as a security deposit for an apartment so they can attain a place to call home or a subway ticket so that they can travel back and forth between work and home.
As a cohesive and motivated group, we are united in our goal of fighting for the victory in the War on Poverty.
Let's hear it for the Bears.
- Zachary Riel
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