Mark Rego
Mark Rego
Aug 24, 2017 · 3 min read

A follow up to Hanna Brooks Olsen’s I-wish-everyone-would-read-this piece. Thank you Hanna.

A couple of years ago I began helping a family of six (four kids) who were living in one room in a local hotel. Everyone I told or asked for help was suspicious. Was I getting taken? Were they drug dealers?

The father was a bit of an operator to get donations. Not always 100% truthful. But only in the service of feeding his family. He also walked the retail roads seeking work. Cleaning up. Shoveling snow. Whatever.

Dad had been a car mechanic and a chef but now because of severe diabetes he could not feel with his hands so those jobs were closed to him (when he had no insulin he would go for a two hour walk to burn off the blood sugar).

I explained to people that poverty does not make for nobility so a little squeeze here and there hardly meant anything. And I heard all the same things: buy in bulk (he lived in one room), budget etc.

They had been around the block and were cuaght in the poverty trap. All now worsened by the closing of food banks and usurious rents in poor districts who cashed in on Section VIII housing (or is it 9, I always forget).

I am a disabled psychiatrist. I like to think I am not easily fooled and I am not. No drugs. No ruses taking place. Yes an extra $50 here and there and getting discount cards from a friend who was selling them illegally. But what in the world would this guy do?

His wife was an alcoholic who disappeared occassionally. I spoke with him about it (if she got a job it would have helped immensley) and he just said that after years of fighting there was no use in going there. He and the kids needed her in whatever capacity. I am not sure but there is a chance a simple antidepressant would have got her out of bed. We will never know because mental health care for the very poor is laughable.

After about a year my health problems worsened and I could not get the father to come around and change a few things to satisfy some of my supporters, including myself. No last minute requests for money I asked. No emergency texts. But he did not work that way. So because of my health and his recalcitrance we parted ways.

He finally lived in a terrible apartment with his kids with a ridiculously high rent. He took a bus an hour and walked 2 miles to a job at night as a hotel clerk. Decent housing and a decent job with health care would have solved many problems for this family. But for now they will suffer and all of the kids will grow up knowing nothing but poverty.

They had no way out. No clever budgeting would help. We as the richest country ever known do not have the simple things they needed. Affordable housing, healthcare, a decent job for a desperately hard working man and a safety net that works. I had a few friends chipping in both money and time. If they were in a livable apartment and had some food help we could have got them doing acceptably well for now. Maybe some trips to the library for the kids (they had no TV).

It all makes me too sad to think about.

)