Today’s guess blogger is Melissa Spradlin, Executive Director of Book’em in Nashville, TN.

I want to tell you about Ben.

From our first meeting, Ben had an extraordinary connection with books. Every time we met to read together, he chose one to keep. He was exceptionally grateful for each one. I could tell the books had a special effect on him.

Ben’s family was homeless. They had been evicted from their home. Sometimes they lived with relatives, sometimes in a shelter.

Ben kept all of his belongings in his backpack, including his books. He carried them with him everywhere he went. He treasured his books – they were among his few possessions. The sturdy spines and crisp pages gave him a sense of home, even when he didn’t have one.

There are so many kids like Ben who cherish the books they receive from First Book. They rely on them as familiar friends during tough times.

If you work with children in need, you can find books and essentials for your students on the First Book Marketplace.

The post Books Gave Him A Sense of Home – Even When He Didn’t Have One appeared first on First Book Blog.

Jose Nuñez lives in a homeless shelter in Queens with his wife and two children. He remembers arriving at the shelter: ‘It’s literally like you are walking into prison. The kids have to take their shoes off, you have to remove your belt, you have to go through a metal detector. Even the kids do. We are not going into a prison, I don’t need to be stripped and searched. I’m with my family. I’m just trying to find a home’.

Maryann Broxton, a lone mother of two, finds life exhausting and made worse by ‘the consensus that, as a poor person, it is perfectly acceptable to be finger printed, photographed and drug-tested to prove that I am worthy of food. Hunger is not a crime. The parental guilt is punishment enough.’

Palma McLaughlin, a victim of domestic violence, notes that ‘now she is poor, she is stigmatised’; no longer ‘judged by her skills and accomplishments but by what she doesn’t have’.

People in poverty feel ashamed because they cannot afford to live up to social expectations. Being a good parent means feeding your children; being a good relative means exchanging gifts at celebrations. Friendships need to be sustained by buying a round of drinks or returning money that has been borrowed. When you cannot afford to do these things, your sense of shame is magnified by others. Friends, even close relatives, avoid you. Your children despise you, asking, for example: ‘why was I born into this family?’. Society similarly accuses you of being lazy, abusing drugs or promiscuity, assumed guilty until proved innocent. You can even be blamed for the ills of your country, the high levels of crime or its relative economic decline. The middle class in Uganda ask: ‘how can Uganda be poor when the soils are rich and the climate is good if it’s not the fault of subsistence farmers’?’

In the US, as in Britain, it may be welfare expenditure that is blamed for stifling productive investment.

Shame is debilitating as well as painful. People avoid it by attempting to keep up appearances, pretending everything is fine. In so doing, they often live in fear of being found out and risk overextending finances and incurring bad debts. People in poverty typically avoid social situations where they risk being exposed to shame; in so doing lose the contacts that might help them out when times get particularly harsh. Sometimes shame drives people into clinical depression, to substance abuse and even to suicide. Shame saps self-esteem, erodes social capital and diminishes personal efficacy raising the possibility that it serves also to perpetuate poverty by reducing individuals’ ability to help themselves.

Shame also divides society. While the stigma attaching to policies can be unintentional, sometimes the result of underfunding and staff working under pressure, the public rhetoric of deserving and undeserving exacerbates misunderstanding between rich and poor, nurturing the presumption that the latter are invariably inadequate or dishonest. Often around the world, stigmatising welfare recipients is deliberate and frequently supported by popular opinion. Blaming and shaming are commonly thought to be effective ways of policing access to welfare benefits and regulating anti-social and self-destructive behaviour. However, such beliefs are based on two assumptions that are untenable. The first is that poverty is overwhelmingly of people’s own making, the result of individual inadequacy. This can hardly be the case in Uganda, Pakistan or India. Nor is so elsewhere. Poverty is for the most part structural, caused by factors beyond individual control relating to the workings of the economy, the mix of factors of production and the outcome of primary and secondary resource allocation. The second assumption is that shaming people changes their behaviour enabling them to lift themselves out of poverty. However, the scientific evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that shaming does not facilitate behavioural change but merely imposes further pain.

Jose, Maryann and Palma were not participants in a research project. Rather they are members of ATD Fourth World, an organisation devoted to giving people in poverty voice, and their testimonials are available to read online. Echoing Martin Luther King, Palma dreams that one day her four children will be judged not by the money in their bank accounts but by the quality of their character.

Headline image credit: ‘Someone Special to Someone, Sometime’ by John W. Iwanski. CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr.

The post Who should be shamefaced? appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Abe’s Lucky Day

 Warren, Jill. (2011) Abe’s Lucky Day. Outskirts Press Inc. ISBN 978-1-4327-7305-2. Age 8 and under.

 Publisher’s description:  Any day can be a lucky day.  Abe is a homeless man who lives in the alley behind a bakery and winter is coming. What will happen on his lucky day that will change his life? 

Our thoughts:

 Introducing us to the varied faces of distress and homelessness, Abe’s Lucky Day reminds us that , while food, warm clothes and dry beds feel great, helping others feels even better. Illustrations permit the child to imagine themselves in the story, and so can feel the heartwarming rewards of selflessness…definitely good for your Litland.com family book club or a preschool classroom. Part luck and lots of kindness, Abe’s Lucky Day infuses a desire for kindness and generosity into its reader’s mind and heart, and is sure to strengthen bonds within the family reading it as well :>) Great for gift-giving, pick up your copy in our Litland.com Bookstore!

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London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew is an extraordinary work of investigative journalism, a work of literature, and a groundbreaking work of sociology. It centres on hundreds of interviews conducted by Mayhew with London’s street traders, beggars, and thieves, which provide unprecedented insight into the day-to-day struggle for survival on London’s streets in the 19th century.

In the video below, our edition’s editor, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, explains why he believes it is still well worth reading today. The interview was conducted by George Miller for Podularity. Robert has previously written this post for OUPblog.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

It was an ordinary enough London winter’s evening: chilly, damp, and churning with crowds. I’d arranged to meet a friend at the Curzon Mayfair cinema, and after my packed tube had been held up between stations – ten sweaty minutes during which my fellow passengers had fumed silently, tutted audibly, and in one or two cases struck up tentative conversations with the person whose shopping was digging into their shins – I was late. Coming out of the entrance to the station, I nimbly side-stepped a beggar with a cardboard sign – sorry, bit of a rush, direct debit to Shelter, can’t stop – and hurried on my way to the cinema.

The film was Slumdog Millionaire: a nerve-shredding if ultimately cheering investigation into the hidden lives of the Indian slums. Coming out of the cinema, though, it was impossible to avoid the realiszation that equally vivid stories lay much closer to home. I retraced my steps to the tube station, and this time instead of brushing the beggar off I listened to what he had to say. It was a sadly familiar account of alcohol, a broken marriage, and homelessness, but as he told it the events took on a vividly personal colouring that was new and strange. He made me look again at what I thought I already knew.

The idea that what takes place under our noses can be hard to see clearly is hardly an original one; indeed, anyone who lives in a city soon learns to recognize the sensation of life being jolted out of its familiar routines, and assumptions being rearranged by new experiences. However, this idea took on a new resonance a few weeks later, when I was asked to edit a new selection of London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew’s mammoth set of interviews with the street-sellers, beggars, entertainers, prostitutes, thieves, and all the rest of the human flotsam and jetsam that had washed up in the capital during the 1840s and 1850s.

Ask most readers – and not a few critics – who Henry Mayhew was, and the result is likely to be at best a puzzled stare. Though his voice pops up occasionally in recent work, from Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Deceptions’ to novels such as Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, for the most part he has become the Invisible Man of Victorian culture. And like H. G. Wells’s hero, usually he is detectable only by the movements of his surroundings, from Charles Kingsley’s jeremiad against the exploitation of cheap tailors in Alton Locke, to the strange echoes of his interview subjects in characters like Jo in Dickens’s Bleak House.

In some ways these literary aftershocks and offshoots of London Labour and the London Poor accurately reflect the work’s own generic hybridity. Opening Mayhew’s pages, it is hard to escape the feeling that you are encountering a writer who has one foot in the world of fact, one foot in the world of fiction, and hops between them with a curious mixture of uncertainty and glee. Sober tables of research are interrupted by facts of the strange-but-true variety: ‘Total quantity of rain falling yearly in the metropolis, 10,686,132,230,400 cubic inches’, or ‘The drainage of London is about equal in length to the diameter of the earth itself’. Even cigar-ends don’t escape his myth-making tendencies. Not content with calculating the number thrown away each week (30,000) and guessing at the proportion picked up by the

NOTE TO SELF: PASS ON RENTING "SLUM DOG MILLIONAIRE"

Let's say... you're a film company who travels to Mumbai, India, to shoot a film focusing upon and that takes place in the Mumbai slums.

Let's say... you come accross some children living in the slums that would be perfect for your film and a decision is made to use them. The word "use" being the key word here.

The film becomes a huge success beyond everyone's wildest dreams and is nominated for an Academy Award. As a perk and perhaps even a promotional gimmick, the child actors are brought to the awards show all dressed up as movie stars usually are. Once the hoopla is over the young actors are returned home and back to their former lives of subsisting from day-to-day, living in shacks. One day a celebrity and now a homeless person.

Young 10-year old "Slumdog Millionaire" star, Azharuddin Ismail, was asleep when awakened and told to leave his family's home as part of a demolition of dozens of Mumbai shanties. It was among 30 shacks razed by city workers. As if that wasn't bad enough and according to Azhar, he was hit by a police officer. For their part authorities are saying that his family will be given a new home elsewhere.

Although the film earned US $326 million in box office receipts, the lives of the Mumbai "actors" haven't benefited from their appearing in the film.

"Slumdog" filmmakers set up a trust, called Jai Ho, after the hit song from the film, to ensure the children get proper homes, a good education and a nest egg when they finish high school. They also donated $747,500 to a charity to help slum kids in Mumbai.

Given this recent setback, it would seem that Azhar needs some of that charity money right away to get a roof over his family's head. Thing is - will he get it.

“When they come up to the desk they are treated with respect and this may be the only place in their lives that they can experience that.” a public interest news story about LAPL and some of the homeless people who come there every day. Since it’s LA, you will not be surprised to learn that one of them has used the library computers to write a screenplay.

by Melissa Sweet Houghton Mifflin 2008 Covers are funny things. You're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but a lot of time goes into making those covers appealing so that you'll pick them up. Also, after the umpteen-millionth time you decide to ignore your gut feeling and give a book a chance despite its cover, and get burned, you decide that maybe you should trust the gut a little

NOTE TO SELF: ONE GENERATION PLANTS THE TREES; ANOTHER GETS THE SHADE


Seems at times that there is a plethora of negative reports and stories focusing on errant youth. It's therefore refreshing to come across a "feel good" story that gives one hope for the future of mankind. It's the kind of story that makes you smile.

Young Jack Davis, aged 11, was perturbed upon learning that Florida restos throw out food due to legal restraints should anyone eating the food become ill or develop food poisoning, since he felt it could be recycled and given to homeless people. He had visited a homeless shelter on school field trips and worried about people going hungry.

Jack's idea was to pass a law that would give restaurant owners' some protection from lawsuits. He got his dad to float the idea to some Florida legislators.

It now seems certain that Jack's idea will become a law.

"If you take away the reason restaurants will not give food -- they will," he said. "And it's kind of it's a win-win situation 'cause the restaurants get to do something good."

When Jack's bill started gaining momentum, he was suddenly big news in Miami.

"When I go to school, people were chanting my name because they saw me on the cover of the Miami Herald," Jack said. "Over the whole day, they were asking me what does the law say. And in some of my classes they clapped as I walked in. If you think there's a problem in the world," he said, "you don't wait for other people to fix it. You have to try to fix it yourself."

Amen to that!

See a photo of Jack here: http://abcnews.go.com/WN/PersonOfWeek/story?id=4123327&page=1

Adults face many challenges when helping children understand the world around them. Some choose to pretend that the world is without its struggles and rush their children past the realities of their communities. When it’s difficult to accept the world the way it is as an adult, it’s pretty much impossible to explain it to the next generation, the one that may be able to make things better.

On this edition of Just One More Book, Mark speaks with social worker and children’s book author and illustrator Tim Huff about his book The Cardboard Shack Beneath the Bridge. They talk about the struggles Tim faced in getting his book published and how adults can help children understand homeless people.

Books and resources discussed:

• The Cardboard Shack Beneath the Bridge
  
• Light Patrol (street outreach program)