Poverty Simulation

On Wednesday, November 1, 2017, I had the chance to be part of an experience that changed my life for the better.  This experience was the poverty simulation, during this simulation you really got to see what the life of a person in poverty is like and what they have to go through just to make it from day to day.  Although I was not part of one of the families during this simulation I was the teacher in the public school.  It was very stressful and frustrating being the teacher because most of the time the students were not motivated to do the work and they did not want to be in school.  I would have to send home cards asking families for money for supplies and most of them would bring little money or no money back.  This is because school supplies was not some of the families priority at the time.  Being the school teacher I experienced a lot of different things.  Some of the things that I experienced were students selling drugs trying to make money for their families.  There were some students who stopped coming to school because they were trying to help their families make money and they did not think that school was important to them.  There was one student in the class who was pregnant and went into labor but did not have the insurance to go to the hospital or the doctor to have the baby.  The point of the simulation was to show us that we do not really know someone until we have walked in their shoes and that we should not judge other people.  We do not know what kind of a background others come from and what struggles they have been through in their lives.

Some of the struggles that the families would have to go through throughout the simulation were finding a way to feed their family from week to week, how they were going to pay their bills, and how they were going to get more money or transportation passes.  The families would only have 15 minutes to do whatever it was that they needed to do within in that week.  After the 15 minutes was up the agencies would close and the families would be sent back to their homes.  The people at the agencies could either make or break a deal for the families and they were the ones that decided whether they got what they needed.


This simulation was an overall very eye-opening experience.  It opened my eyes to something that is all around me every day.  I never knew that families had to go through this much trouble just to get from place to place and how hard it was to feed their children just for the week.  These are the things that we take for grant it and we don't realize that until we don't have them