Each year as part of their training in New York, the new class of Acumen Fund fellows is sent out into the city armed only with a $6 metro card, a $5 bill, and their IDs. Their mission is to experience the challenges of obtaining basic services with these meager, minimal resources; in the course of the day, they stand in soup kitchens, visit shelters, and attempt access to medical care. Over the next week, we will be sharing their experiences on our blog. The second in this three part series comes from Kevin Martin.
After Training, Kevin will work in Tanzania with D.light Design on marketing solar-powered lights to low-income families. With his wife, Kevin founded a HIV/AIDS education program in Tanzania. He has experience working with sustainable enterprises and international development organizations. Kevin has an MBA from the University of North Carolina.
I am beginning my day just as I will end it, waiting. Sitting in the adult triage ward of Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn I take hold of my surroundings. Looking out towards the entrance of the ER, I see four members of the NYPD gamely though calmly wrestle a half-naked man to the ground. Back here in the waiting room, the television blares the Price is Right. And for a moment I imagine that this show and its flashy prizes – washing machines, new cars, Caribbean vacations – represent the hopes and desires of those in the waiting room. Looking around at the blank stares, spare conversations, and idly impatient foot tapping however, I quickly realize that the Price is Right is merely pretense, if anything a backdrop for the endless waiting; nobody is paying much attention to it at all.
The waiting room steadily fills, and by 11:15 it is standing room only. Feeling claustrophobic, I move into the hallway for some air. A woman holding on to her sick son is on a cell phone, venting her frustration. I position myself next to her and a group of mothers waiting to see the nurse. “This is the wrong day to come in here – I should come back at two in the morning and maybe then they can see me,” one of them exclaims. The others agree. “I am miserable” the woman continues. Her son, who, earlier in the day fell out of bed and injured his head, sits on the floor beside her. A cop walks by and one of the women stops him.
“Can I borrow your uniform so that they’ll let me in?” The cop chuckles in response and continues down the hall while the mothers start to guess how many people are still left in front of them.
I feel out of place here. Even when experiencing the waiting room as a spectator it is depressing. Eventually the pallid lights and olfactory assault of disinfectant and sickness prove too much for me and I decide to relocate to the Social Services department across the street. As I round the corner, I am welcomed by a line stretching around the block. I wander towards the front of the line and discover that it vanishes into the glass entrance of the Social Services building. I walk to the back of the line and take my place. Others join the queue behind me. All of our brief conversations seem to center on the impossibly long line. Lunchtime passes and my stomach growls as I catch a whiff of French fries from the McDonalds across the street. I am still waiting and now I am hungry.
Finally, I make it inside the building. And wait. I continue to strike up casual conversations with the people around me. The woman behind me is here for food stamps. She comes often for this reason. The man in front of me is an out of work carpenter looking for job assistance. He has been here before but his paper work was incorrectly processed and now he is back for a second try. This furtive conversation is eventually consumed by the scale of the endless wait, and we quietly succumb to our new fate. But I continue to listen to the exchanges around me, noticing the temporary friendships, the sense of camaraderie developing between my new neighbors. I hear stories about people’s youths, about their lives. One woman confides in me, complaining that her bedroom is haunted by a past tenant’s ghost.
I finally reach the main receptionist, a stern, matronly woman, and tell her I am interested in applying for job assistance and Medicare. I am told that I must be on public assistance to apply for either, handed a large stack of forms, and sent to the third floor to wait some more. I step onto the elevator behind one of the center’s employees. The doors shut and he glances at the stack of papers in my arms. “Never be ashamed to ask for help, man, never be ashamed. You are an American citizen and deserve this. Take it all, man – Medicare, food stamps. Take what you need.” The doors open and I thank him. As they close behind me he shouts out one more time “don’t be ashamed!”
I enter a new waiting room and fall back into my now familiar role. It takes another hour to be called up by the next receptionist to be assigned a case worker. I pass the time by browsing through the packet and chatting with those around me. The forms I have been given are complicated and plentiful. I cannot imagine filling them out correctly on my own. I mention this to the woman next to me and she succinctly articulates the vicissitudes of the welfare process: “Man, every time I fill this shit out they just send me back to fill out more shit.”
Despite the drone of the television and the oppressive fluorescent lights, the atmosphere in this waiting room is jocular and friendly. People share stories and crack jokes. The workers at the center treat everyone with dignity and kindness. We have all fallen into a certain shared fatalism; no one is challenging the system or demanding that the process be hurried, and in an odd way this resignation relieves some of our collective frustration. We will see a social worker today only if it is in fact our destiny to do so.
I soon learn that today it is not part of my destiny. After four hours of waiting, it is time for me to return to Acumen Fund’s office. I step onto the subway feeling frustrated, disempowered, and confused. I feel guilty about how bored I felt for much of the day, how tedious it seemed. After all, my day can be summarized in two words: interminable waiting. It does not require much imagination to envision a more efficient system, one without so much waiting. Each of my comrades-in-line spent the majority of their day dreaming of the many things they would rather be doing, the many things that, given the opportunity, they could have been doing. No, moral imagination is not the challenge here. The challenge is how to bridge the gap between the harsh, perpetually stalling reality to which I was witness and the imaginative potential of the men and women with whom I spent my day waiting. And that, I suppose, is the challenge facing every social entrepreneur across the globe.