Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Itinerant Summer Camp Counselor on Indian Reservations
Do you know what the poorest county in the US is? Neither do I, but at the time, it was Todd County, SD, where the Pine Ridge Reservation meets the Rosebud Reservation. This is raw desert. This is nobody's ancestral lands because nobody would or could live here long-term. This is just where a big section of the Lakota people got shoved.
We would go into a town, and set up our weeklong free program for the local kids. We stayed with locals, or slept on the floor of churches in sleeping bags. We had to bring in all of our own supplies and most of our own food, partly because there was nowhere to buy anything but also because if we ate what the locals had to serve us we got malnourished and depressed –we learned this the hard way, and almost crashed the program two weeks in from burnout, we were so miserable. We would do our best to give the kids some fun, some education, and a good lunch but ultimately they just wandered in and out as they would and other than enforcing "no fighting" in the program areas we were powerless to do anything more.
I live on the West Side of Chicago now, a block away from a permanent homeless camp. I've been homeless myself, briefly, before I got my life turned around. I'm no stranger to urban poverty. But as bad as it is, I would take it over rural poverty any day. At least in the city you can get up and walk away. Resources are underfunded but they're there. Out in the desert, on the rez... all you have is the community, and the community is broke.
Wow. How sad. I never considered the difference between urban and rural poverty... I have some experience with the former but not really the latter. Thank you for the insight.
If I may ask, what food were the locals eating that you had to bring your own?
Part of it was that we were guests, so the hospitality culture dictated that we were served "celebration" type foods: hotdogs, iceberg salad, frybread. Which is fun but not a long-term diet.
The main thing was the lack of vegetables, especially fresh vegetables. There's nowhere to grow them and nowhere to buy them, and even if you drive off the rez, an hour to Valentine, NE for a real supermarket, the prices are very high.