What Multidimensional Poverty Takes from Us
Back when I lived in Kitchener-Waterloo, I moved within Canadian class strata. Such was the nature of a region with prominent bubbles for tech, finance, and academic science; a service-oriented class that supported them in retail, transport, cleaning, and related front-facing public positions; and the factory/manual-labour set (including in the nearby town of Cambridge) that also included people struggling to stay off the streets for all sorts of volatile reasons.
In my later years, in Kitchener, I lived across the street from a youth shelter and two halfway houses for folks transitioning out of medical-intervention programs and incarceration. Some folks were well enough not to need full-time care, but not enough to live entirely on their own—and not enough to be able to fill their days with much more than sitting on a corner and watching traffic go by. In an unfortunate stroke of luck, there was an abandoned house not far from these services, where some went to shoot up; on at least two occasions, I saw police raid and then escort folks out of the residence: the occupants zip-tied and seated in dutiful, dazed lines on the stoop.
Up the street was a women and families shelter where I sometimes volunteered, and where people were living to escape violence, work through addiction programs, or because they had nowhere else to go. A few blocks in another direction was the men’s shelter, which had strict hours and rules, and where men were always seen smoking and/or playing cards out front.
Downtown Kitchener is where the courts were, and the medical centres, so it made perfect sense that these social programs would be present in the vicinity, too. Why shouldn’t people live close to the services they needed?
But of course, our highly stratified culture was such that tech workers commuting into Kitchener from other parts of Ontario felt entitled to suggest that the city should do something about the unsightly beggars, or people otherwise resting in public while working through challenging life situations. At one juncture, downtown businesses even protested Food Not Bombs, a volunteer service that offered vegan meals to street folk once a week, for operating by the city square and bringing so-called undesirables to the fore, ostensibly impacting business by un-prettifying the view.
As a student in Waterloo before my time in Kitchener, I once had a subletter from a very difficult background: someone who had bounced around in local fosters, because his father was in prison for abuse against him, his mother, and the father’s mother. That individual had ended up a teen dad of two children with severe special needs, and had developed none of the emotional maturity necessary to avoid further difficult relationships. While subletting from me, he lost his job due to a girlfriend weaponizing a peace bond that I’d had no idea had been issued against him; they’d been together for a year after its one-way issuance, with her always threatening to turn him in for breaking it if he didn’t do what she wanted. After one heated argument, she followed through, he was arrested, and he lost the factory job with which he was paying child support. He wasn’t able to pay rent for the next few months, always promising he’d pay me back soon—but the burden was too heavy, so one night he simply bolted with all his belongings. This was very hard on me, as I wasn’t doing well financially either, but I also understood that his life wasn’t great.
Across the street from my building unit were also many economically fragile families, including but not limited to immigrants from Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and Hmong regions of Vietnam. The homes were often filled with children and very little in the way of material wealth—bare bones or with clearly shared beds and run-down furniture. One of these homes (one of the non-immigrant ones) had been the site of child sex abuse: an awful situation involving many men in the extended family. A lack of oversight abounded for all the kids here, with less-littles routinely responsible for littles, and toddlers sometimes seen wandering about in diapers and unsupervised. The year I moved to Colombia, there was a news item about a tot hit and killed in the parking lot, with no guardian around. It surprised me not a whit.
When I moved to Kitchener, I encountered plenty more people with extraordinary life stories like my past roommate’s. When I came home from work in Waterloo, the more affluent of the joined cities (and a place where people would sometimes expressly tell those out begging to “go back to Kitchener”), I would sometimes encounter such economically adrift people, struggling to navigate families of addiction and violence, hanging out at the convenience store in my building. These were people whose days were spent working whatever odd jobs they could find, and who smoked, drank, or did other drugs extensively to take the edge off their precarity; people who had not accessed healthcare in quite some time, who suffered dental pain because there were no options until it was emergency-room bad, and whose schooling had dropped off well before Grade 10, leaving them with little institutional know-how.
This was a common underbelly of Ontario life, though not one often discussed. Many white people in this unstable cohort are anti-immigrant, generally racist, and maybe even associated with skinheads—out of a place of lost pride, and a scramble to reclaim dignity for their economic disorientation by blaming perceived outsiders for their lot. Shame also brought many to insist on their Christianity while out begging. A few told me of regional church programs that would offer sandwiches or a hot meal if they would first attend service, so they got good at trying to prove their “worth” for aid and attention by quoting scripture.
Once, on a terribly wet January night—the kind of slushy-cold Canadian winter night that kills people—a man in his thirties showed up at the bookstore where I worked, and almost passed out then and there. He wasn’t drunk. He was faint from the stress of having wandered a city he’d found himself stuck in without money, defensively confused after having slept on the street the night before and still haven’t having made enough begging to get a ticket back to his small town, where he had a relative who would let him crash once he was home.
It was late, and I was about to close up, and nowhere else was open, and I knew the men’s shelter wouldn’t take anyone at that late hour. I also knew that I wasn’t going to let this person wander the wet-cold streets until he passed out in a snow drift. He needed to get on an intercity bus in the morning, and he needed to not die in the night.
So I took him home, to sleep on the couch in my one-bedroom apartment, and to get him his ticket to safety the next day.
Not always the brightest thing for a feminized person living alone to do.
But something I felt was necessary, and also not nearly as high-risk as it sounds, considering how absolutely fragile this human being was.
The human who had got himself into this situation was, however, very much of that economically adrift category. He hadn’t been stably housed or food-secure for some time, his level of education was profoundly low, and he had built elaborate coping mechanisms to deflect from admitting his knowledge gaps. When we took the city bus back to my apartment, he didn’t know how such transit worked, because he’d never used it before, he said. This was possibly true, considering the small town he was from , but which he hastened to explain with a grand claim about how what he liked was cars, because cars were more manly, and if he didn’t have a car he’d rather walk than be a man who used public transit.
It was a different way of performing masculinity while feeling emasculated by his circumstances—and not the only one he’d try to pull on me. It confused and humiliated him to have been offered aid by a youngish feminized person who didn’t see him as a threat, and who didn’t invite him into their bed. In the middle of the night from the couch, he called over that he didn’t want me to think that he wouldn’t have made a move if the circumstances were different. In the morning, when we got him to the intercity bus station, he reiterated that if he’d only had his strength he would have shown me how good he was at sex. Coming from someone I had learned the night before was incredibly ill-educated, for want of proper schooling and healthcare throughout his life, there was no menace in the highly inappropriate statement. I was simply dealing with a level of poverty that doesn’t fit neatly into simple financial metrics. He was multidimensionally poor, moving through our world not only absent money but also a great number of other socioeconomic factors that create stable human beings.
And that was the first-world variant of this important, if oft-overlooked term.
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