The Options Committee of Making Kenora Home is proposing the sixth poverty challenge, A Walk in Other’s Shoes. This year, we have asked our local business community to take the challenge.

Participants have been asked to attempt to stay within a social assistance benefits’ budget. A single person on Ontario Works would receive $305 per month, $10.00 per day, or $50.00 for the five-day period. A couple would receive $468 per month, allowing a daily budget of $15.60 or $78.00 for five days.

The budget includes all food and drink, entertainment, some personal supplies and transportation costs. Each participant will be given a daily challenge card, which will reveal an additional challenge to be completed before the end of each day.

The participants will experience some of the hurdles that people living on social assistance face. It is hoped that the event will raise awareness and break barriers for people living in poverty. The challenge takes place February 16th until February 21st, 2016.

Saturday, February 20, 2016

The End

Marion used a cloth and toothpaste to clean her teeth.
She made a delicious lunch with left over Spanish rice with tuna mixed in and added sautéed mushrooms and onions on the side with sweet potato fries.
Add to the inventory, three rolls of toilet paper, most of a tube of toothpaste and something else that I can't remember.
We made it! We are free to go back to our lives which now seem rather opulent after these five days. Thank to God for looking after us.

Day 5 begins

Breakfast of oatmeal complete. Looking forward to food security.
Daily challenge: The dog ate my toothbrush.
First of all, Zoey would not do that.
Secondly, we are too poor to have a dog.
Thirdly, I will go to Dr. Dean Kozak's office a ask them if they will give me two toothbrushes, assuming the dog ate both. Dean used to be our dentist before we were poor. He and his wife Melanie go to Haiti and provide dental work for the poor. His older brother went to school with my son.
If the above doesn't work, then I will try the dollar store or ask for one at one of the hotels or try the Minto Resource Centre or use my finger.
Off for Zoey's walk and then off to work, today for the church and an errand for Rotary. Just like the old days, only a half day on Saturday. We are not very good at retirement. By continuing to work at volunteer activities, we at least have not lost our holidays and weekends like fully retired people.

Friday, February 19, 2016

Day 4

A very busy day. I took my lunch with me: 1/4 of the second French bread loaf that Marion made, a carrot, some broccoli and half of a left over pancake that we made earlier.
Marion, the brains in this outfit, figured out that to deal with the medical appointment challenge in Winnipeg, per our daily challenge, we would call our Ontario Works case worker and they would provide a voucher for transportation and $100/night if we had to stay over. If we are not on Ontario Works and one of our much too large population of working poor, then it gets a lot trickier. We would ask a friend who has internet to post our need for a ride to and from Winnipeg and hope to catch a ride with someone. Failing this, Marion would ask her son who lives in Winnipeg to pick us up, a large cost for him.
Marion used up some left over rice,  beans and carrot, and mixed it with chopped onion and garlic and made it up like a stew for lunch.
We just finished supper and it was a pot of Spanish rice made like we did earlier in the week, except I forgot to add half a tin of tuna, and added sautéed mushrooms with onion and garlic. I used a half a cube of chicken bouillon in each of the rice and mushrooms for flavour.
Tomorrow is day five and we are sitting in good shape on food. Our inventory includes: 1/3 of our flour, 1/2 bag of rice, 1 tin tuna, 1/2 can of coffee, 1 packet of yeast, 5 1/2 packets of baking powder, 2/3 bag of oats, 7 eggs, 100 grams of mushrooms, 2/3 of our pinto beans (cooked), 3 onions, 1 crown of broccoli, 2/3 sweet potato, 3 cubes of chicken bouillon and almost a full bottle of oil. Total value of groceries left is $17. If we would have had to pay for bus fare this week to go back and forth to our volunteer "jobs" we would not have made it.
We are really looking forward to a real meal with real protein and not having to worry about whether we can afford it. How much would it suck to not have that to look forward to?
Our meals have been pretty decent, but we spent way too much energy and time dealing with food and food insecurity.
Now I want to read our poverty buddies' blogs and then finish up some homework left over from a busy day. Wouldn't mind sipping a libation while doing so. I guess that is still water for today. Again, we have something to look forward to and if we were in this for real, we wouldn't.

Day 4

Good Morning All. Well have the elation of a FREE breakfast yesterday, we are back down to earth with a solid crunch this morning. Our daily challenge is that we have a doctor's appointment in Winnipeg and must assume we don't have a car. Greyhound is $44.70. It costs more than that to drive anyway. We just cannot come up with $45for a trip to Winnipeg, so we must:
  1. Find out if there is any assistance for this.
  2. Post on social media to see if someone is going to Winnipeg and the work on a ride back. I can stay with the kids in Winnipeg if I have to stay over. Lucky for that.
  3. Marion hasn't had her coffee yet, so I won't ask her until later. She is the brains in this outfit.
I have to go to work for Rotary now, so will get back to this later. BIG Challenge!!
Being poor can be depressing. Thank goodness we had some joy yesterday. We must find a way to spread joy after we get to walk out of poverty on the weekend.

Thursday, February 18, 2016

Free Breakfast

What an interesting start to Day 3! This morning was our Rotary Club's monthly Fellowship Breakfast. I had told our president, Patty McLeod, that I could not attend due to the poverty challenge. She insisted that I come and share our experiences in the challenge with our members and that she would buy me breakfast. This was a generous offer and a great opportunity to share the challenges. I decided on the way to breakfast that I would share the information, but decline breakfast, as it was really against the rules. Our group were quite interested in the challenge and had good questions.
When I was done my presentation and ready to leave, I received a text from Marion letting me know that our daily challenge was in fact a bonus: FREE BREAKFAST. We could have breakfast outside of our daily allowance. We decided to cook breakfast from our larder that is outside of our five day supply of food, rather than go out for breakfast.
We have spent two days watching every morsel of food for cost and making sure that we could make it through the week and passing on many of the foods we enjoy because they are outside of our budget. What excitement to make a breakfast without regard for budget nor quantity! We indulged in an omelet made with FOUR eggs, CHEESE and onion; toast and jam, sautéed broccoli, orange juice and yogurt with blueberries and cinnamon. What a feast! This event brought such elation into our budget stressed lives. We must find a way to share this sort of bonus in order to bring elation to others.
Some further observations:
I keep saying that I do not know how someone on Ontario Works could purchase all the basic supplies needed such as dish soap, laundry soap, personal soap, shampoo, conditioner, shaving supplies, deodorant, Kleenex, etc. Well I do know and I was reminded of it by one of the Rotarians: we would have to go for meals at the different shelters until we saved enough to buy this stuff.
We could go to the Minto Resource Centre and purchase some of our basic groceries at their discounted prices.
We could try cheating the system and claiming to be single. That would increase our allowance for basic needs to $610/month from $468/month and it would increase our accommodation allowance to $762/month from $609/month.
Living in poverty sure encourages one to think about bending or breaking the rules.
The allowances sound so much better when expressed in monthly amounts. $610/month is $10/day/person. Now it doesn't look like so much.
So we are off and running into day 3 and what a wonderful start it is. We have soup and bread for lunch that we made last night. Supper will be another culinary delight created from beans, mushrooms and sweet potato.
We have two unknown challenges to meet and only $4 in the kitty.
Many people are not this fortunate.

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Weekly Specials

Now that hurts a little. I just received the weekly specials flyer from Consumers Frosted Foods.

Day 2 Continued

We just enjoyed a very good meal. We used up almost one third of the pinto beans that we soaked overnight and cooked today. Marion mashed some up in the late afternoon and mixed them with 1/3 of a chopped onion. We scooped this mixture onto a couple of slices of the flatbread that we made last night and this was our late afternoon snack. Marion usually has tea in the afternoon and she is getting by without it by either drinking hot water or watered down espresso coffee.
Back to dinner. I mixed the crushed beans with chopped onion, chopped garlic and the other half of the canned tuna from last night. This was then fried and turned out a little like fish cakes. Add to this some white rice cooked with a chicken cube, chopped carrot and chopped onion and some steamed broccoli. Marion made French Bread (2 loaves) this afternoon using the whole wheat flour and yeast, so we had half a loaf with dinner, froze a loaf and have some bread to go with the soup that is cooking for lunch tomorrow. We still have about 1/3 of our flour left.
We saved all of the peels from the vegetables, including the sweet potato which will be made into fries for supper tomorrow. The peels are cooking in water on the stove. In about an hour or so, I will take out the peels, add some chicken cubes, a chopped onion, garlic and two carrots and that will be soup for the next couple of days.
We are comfortable that we have enough food to make it through and we will have some left over. What we are concerned about is the challenges, because we only have $4 left. We are encouraged because supper was pretty good, tasty even and we are feeling full.

Day 2 begins

Day 2 begins as we have finished lunch. I agree with Craig that we are spending a lot more time thinking about what we will eat and whether we can make it through on what we have. We are also spending a little more time cooking. Marion is making bread and I made flatbread and pancakes twice. The decision to purchase flour was brilliant as it cost about the same as a loaf of bread.
Marion had a meeting this morning and stopped at the store and we `splurged 'on chicken bullion cubes to make soup and butter to make some of the stuff we are eating a little more palatable. She also looked after our daily challenge, to buy chocolate for a craving that would not go away. I cannot do chocolate anymore because I am diabetic. Marion aced it. She bought a small bag of rosebuds in bulk for $0.35, so our total grocery bill today was $8.97 and that puts us at $66.22 so far. The total includes $0.79 for the garlic that we had here and did not buy more to replace, $1.50 for the half container of blueberries that would have spoiled otherwise and $4.99 for hand cream that we have here.
We also figure that we will be using about $8.00 worth of on hand supplies such as soap etc. We just could not have bought all the personal stuff that we need or use on the allowance of $78.00. So we have $4 left. Going to be tight. Hope we don`t get any expensive challenges.
Marion realised this morning while she was applying her face cream, that she couldn't' afford the stuff that she uses, so she will get by this week using hand cream, thus the addition of $4.99 for hand cream.
Like the others, it is very nice to have a warm cozy home to live in and also heartening to know that we will graduate from poverty in four more days.
Now back to check on the huge pot of pinto beans that is cooking on the stove; cannot afford to have it ruined; that is our major source of protein for the rest of the week.
We had pancakes and an egg each for lunch. We now have 8 eggs left. Breakfast is oatmeal with milk. We will have some stuff left over at the end of the five days, such as oatmeal and cooking oil.

HST

What! There is HST on toilet paper and toothpaste! Is toilet paper a luxury? I guess the tax on toothpaste is understandable as getting the taste out of your mouth may be a luxury.

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Challenge Day One


Well here we are part way through Day 1 of the poverty challenge. Marion and I went grocery shopping after the “weigh in” this morning and as I packed our meagre supplies into bags at the grocery store, I was overwhelmed with a sense of failure, that I had let my partner down by not providing well enough for our needs. I have always been a good provider once I got out on my own and past the first two weeks of food deprivation.

We spent $49.97 on groceries and there isn’t a hint of meat in the bags. The closest to meat is two tins of canned tuna.

We sat in the car and ate a meatball sandwich that Marion had made from leftovers, so our challenge will not end until after lunch on Saturday. By 3:30 this afternoon, I was hungry and would normally have enjoyed some cheese and crackers. No cheese and crackers on the welfare allowance. I made a batch of pancakes using the flour, milk and an egg that we had purchased. Nothing on it, no baking powder to make it fluffy, but it took the edge off the hunger.

For dinner, we will be eating Spanish rice, made with rice, a can of tomatoes, an onion and garlic from our supplies. We may add some of the tuna in order to get some protein.

Other observations during our first day:

  1. We would likely not be able to keep our beautiful loving dog Zoey if we were truly in this predicament. If we did, she would have to get used to a much tougher diet. Right now she eats $90 of food per month plus another $40 of supplements and then there are the vet bills. I do not want to think about giving up Zoey nor her eventual demise.
  2. How could we afford large garbage bags? We could use bags from the grocery for the household baskets, but the large ones would be a challenge.
  3. We did not purchase any personal nor household cleaners and soaps. Some of the groceries we purchased will make more than one week, such as the oatmeal. That would leave a little money for soap or even deodorant. We did purchase a tube of toothpaste.
  4. It would be a real challenge to build up stock on laundry soap, dish soap, shampoo, hand soap, deodorant, shaving supplies, spices etc. as it would take time for things like a three week supply of oatmeal to leave room for other supplies. I am doubtful that we could ever get well supplied on the basics.
  5. It was difficult to walk by all of the stuff that we usually buy without thinking and to be weighing produce to see if we could afford it.
  6. Our original plan was to buy a chicken and cook it and then make stock from it for soup. The chickens cost $10 and we had to walk away.
  7. Our challenge today was to go for lunch with a friend knowing that we would pay for our own lunch. Even if we had only a bowl of soup each, the bill would be about $10. Hey that is a whole chicken that we passed up. We made an excuse and did not go for lunch. Do that a few times and the friend will stop asking and drift away.
  8. This exercise makes one keenly aware of not wasting anything. One of the pinto beans tried to escape while I was rinsing them before soaking. I sprang after it and captured it before it could reach the drain.
  9. We have $28 left in our allowance, but we are not comfortable using it on groceries yet, because who knows what is around the corner.
  10. I hope that the rice dish fills us at dinner. I had forgotten what it is like to feel hungry most of the time; not a place I wanted to go back to.
  11. We are aware that we could go to one of the drop in places and get a meal, but that would be taking away from people who really need it. In addition, if we went to the shelter, we would have to allow $2éeach for each way, total of $8 and there is that chicken showing up again.

Day One has been a little depressing, but we are still on the green side of the grass.

So after dinner, I made flat bread, basic pizza dough recipe rolled out really thin. It takes the place of crackers for a little snack. We are getting a lot of mileage out of $3 worth of whole wheat flour and $2 worth of yeast.

We watched television during the evening and I don`t know if we could on Ontario Works. Internet, TV and cell phones cost us more than $200 per month. Maybe it is less in Kenora.

I have been on a weight reduction program and use Calorycount.com. It tracks everything and gives me a summary. I came up short on Vitamin A and on Calcium, but everything else was good. I feel full now and am way under on my calories today, so feeling a little more positive than earlier.

Marion had a suggestion earlier and that is that it is good to find other people in similar circumstances and then pool grocery purchases in order to get the better prices on the larger quantities. That could make a large difference.

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

We Are So Fortunate

I was once told that you should never criticise someone until you walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you do criticise, you are at least a mile away and you have their shoes.
The last time I did a poverty challenge was in 1967 and it was for real. My Mom moved from a dumpy house into a really dumpy house, mostly because my step father was an alcoholic and he drank most of their income. This was his second world war legacy, addiction to alcohol and nicotine to help deal with what would be diagnosed today as PTSD, but there wasn't any help in those days.
Anyway, I wasn't emotionally prepared to go further down the dilapidated house slide, so I decided it was time to leave home. It happened that it was payday from my construction job and I had almost $100 left after giving Mom some money that I owed her.
I took a room in a $3/night hotel in East Calgary and it turned out to be as bad as the house I had just left. I couldn't get the window to close and was very cold that night. I upgraded the next night to a nicer east end hotel that cost $4.50/night. It is odd that after almost fifty years I can remember how much I paid for the rooms. I thought I had enough money for two meals each day. I had to take lunch to the job site each day and I would alternate between breakfast and supper each day. That got me through week one. I forgot that I needed to buy gas for the car to get back and forth to work. Gasoline was $0.45 a gallon then.
During week two I only had enough money to buy lunch each day, a sandwich and an apple. It was not anywhere close to looking after the calories I was burning, as we were working physically for ten hours a day on a scaffold installing ceilings on commercial projects. Today most people would ask their employer for an advance. In those days, asking for an advance amounted to asking to be laid off. Suck it up and keep going. I never have been so hungry in my life as I was during that two week period.
Finally payday arrived. I went over to the York Hotel for supper and ordered veal cutlets with mashed potatoes, gravy and boiled vegetables. What a feast. I would have done almost anything for a meal like that during those past two weeks. Oh it tasted so good! My stomach had shrunk. I couldn't finish it. I fought back tears as I paid the bill for supper and then had a good cry when I got back to my car. I found a rooming house for the next month and left there for my own apartment after a month. The meals in the rooming house were almost as meager as the two week, lack of income induced diet I had endured.
I was lucky. I had a good job where I was able to advance quickly and it also paid for my university education. I have been blessed with good skill sets, an ability to learn and an abundance of stubbornness, discipline and work ethic. Not everyone is as lucky and it is so much easier to give up when you are facing long odds and challenges that you feel you cannot overcome.
I am looking forward to the five days of challenge because it will reinforce how fortunate we are and the incredible challenges that so many in our society have to face daily. We will not be able to operate the challenge fully because of where we live, out on the lake about a thirty minute drive from town. Not a place where economically challenged people could consider living. We will deduct an "in town" allowance for utilities from our five day stipend and go from there. Certainly a glass of wine with dinner or a wee dram of malt will be out of the question. Something to look forward to at the end of the five days. We are so lucky that we know when our challenge will end.
Thanks be to God!
Fred.