♪ down here at the pawn shop ♪

Last night, the Noisette Foundation building was broken into.  Someone stole a t.v. while damaging a couple other items i.e. the lock on the door and a printer.  I can say this, I'm not surprised.  This neighborhood is so poverty stricken and this building is so old and decrepit and has a million and one ways to enter it's no wonder someone helped themselves.  The cops are now here investigating but (for this) I'd be VERY surprised if they were able to retrieve the stolen booty :O 

On a somewhat similar note I wanted to let you know how the poverty simulation went (well!).  So like I said earlier I was volunteering as a staff member of one of the "community resources".  The handful of us who showed up to the training were able to get first dibs on what community resource we wanted to work for.  There were options like social worker, teacher at local school, food store worker, police officer, employer...etc. but I decided to be "Big Dave" and work at "Big Dave's Pawn Shop".  Participants would come to my shop to sell their assets (t.v.s, microwaves, diamond rings, furniture...) for cash and I had the right to either refuse to buy their goods or buy them at whatever price I wanted to.  It was so interesting having the role of a staff member as opposed to being a participant.  The participants experience a lot of stress since they have close to no assets and still have to provide for their family.  But the staff members, on the other hand, have a lot of power and can act however they want to these participants.  We were even encouraged to act unfriendly, impatient, etc. in order to make the simulation more realistic.  In an effort not to interrupt the realism I played my role as an apathetic and grumpy pawn broker (so like me hah).  

It was also interesting to see how into their roles the participants became.  At the beginning of the simulation there was a lot of giggling and lollygagging (man do I love that word) but once the participants started to fully grasp what they were supposed to be doing everyone literally became physically stressed and their attitudes did a complete 180.  People became aggressive and moody and acted in ways they never thought they would -- some even resorted to stealing from other participants because they were so desperate for money.  And to prove how realistic that is we saw a real life example of that here at Noisette.  All of the participants were middle to upper class MUSC employees or affiliates who have and will never experience life in poverty BUT I know a lot, if not all, of the participants changed their views on poverty which is exactly the point.