Mon, Aug 31, 2009 page9

• Seventy years after ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ poor go from dust to bust

  • By Chris McGreal / THE GUARDIAN
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  Looking back on the past few weeks, Johnnie Levy can see how she was driven to the brink of death and didn’t care.

  The sharpest economic downturn of her 63 years stripped Levy of her beloved job as a seamstress and unravelled her world until she found herself sitting in a Tulsa church hall waiting to see a nurse with a syringe in one hand and a Bible in the other.

  Tulsa has seen its share of desperation over the years. In the 1930s it saw a tide of hundreds of thousands struggling west along Route 66 to escape economic collapse in the north and the notorious dustbowl of drought and wind across the midwest. Whether they had lost their land or their jobs, the flow of impoverished humanity — chronicled so devastatingly through the fictional Joad family in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath — struggled hard to feed and clothe their children as they trekked toward an illusory dream of prosperity in distant California.

  To travel the old road today — stumbling upon crumbling ghost towns and half abandoned communities, the sprawling native American desert reservations, through cities where people work all the hours they aren’t sleeping and still cannot afford to go to the doctor — is to encounter new despair, some of it still recognizable to the Joads. The banks are once again evicting. Foreclosures plague the parts of northern Arizona and New Mexico traversed by the evicted 70 years ago.

  But the monster, as Steinbeck described the financial system, has spawned modern beasts unknown to the Joads, such as vast multinationals discarding US workers in favor of cheaper labor in Mexico and the health insurance companies that cut off medical lifelines to the gravely ill.

  And those who fall off the juggernaut of US capitalism, like Levy, or who fail to find space on it in the first place, face considerable challenges in a land with an inherent suspicion of people in need.

  At Tulsa’s Friendship Baptist Church, there were a dozen or more staring at a television with an animated preacher beseeching them to follow the word of God. Everyone had an eye on a door at the front of the church. Periodically a name was called to a van in the car park painted with the logo Good Samaritan, in which doctors and nurses — all required to be good Christians — offered free consultations and medicines to those whom Oklahoma’s hospitals don’t want to see because they can’t pay.

  The van makes the rounds of Tulsa’s churches in run-down neighborhoods, providing for the working poor, struggling pensioners and newly unemployed Americans when their health becomes an extra burden to the daily trial of paying rent and putting food on the table.

  “I’m a seamstress and I love to sew,” Levy said. “I bragged about the fact that was the best job I’ve ever had. It affected me very emotionally when I lost my job. That’s one of the reasons I stopped taking the medications. I got to the point where I didn’t care, and that’s not right.”

  Levy was cut adrift when the recession wiped out her job in June, taking with it the medical insurance that paid the cost of the daily dose of insulin she needs to counter diabetes.

  Although she has a pension, most of it is taken by rent on a one-bedroom apartmant and food and utilities. She shakes her head at her confused priorities but said there simply wasn’t enough money left to meet the high cost of medicines.

  “I didn’t realize how badly it affected my health until I came here for treatment a couple of weeks ago. My blood sugar level was more than four times what it should be,” she said. “I really have nothing else to lean back on.”

  In the Bible belt, religious organizations step in to the breach: charity healthcare comes with God thrown in.

  Tulsa, like so many cities in the US, remains racially divided, with much of its African-American population gathered in neighborhoods separated by railway tracks from the shiny, soulless center and its pristine riverside walks.

  The church has a mostly black congregation. But the clinic draws white faces across boundaries that many in the city would not normally cross.

  Among them is Harmony Banes, raised in poverty and without love by a drug-addicted mother.

  “When I was in high school my family only had 60 bucks a month for groceries for five people. We lived in a trailer,” she said.

  Banes is 27 and a mother herself. Her husband earns about US$25,000 a year as a bartender. From that there’s the rent, two young mouths to feed, and interest on college loans. That leaves nothing for medical insurance for Banes or her husband, although the children get free cover from the state of Oklahoma. So she’s at the clinic to get blood tests.

  “I pretty much hold back from going to the doctor,” she said. “I was raised in a very poor family and never had insurance through high school, so for me it’s normal. Thank God I’ve never been super sick. If ever I needed something, somehow it was provided. God willing, whatever way it came, it came. If the need’s not met there’s a reason, I guess.”

  Veronica Banks, the minister at Friendship Baptist church, said that as the financial crisis has deepened the free clinics are seeing more people like Banes.

  “You see a lot of children in need here,” she said. “You see a lot of elderly in need, a lot of single mothers and a lot of the working poor.”

  “Even though they’re working they cannot afford medical care. They’re on minimum-wage jobs or only working part-time,” Banks said.

  “We know the faces, we know the names. Generally in the past it was rare we had to turn people away. But within the last eight months we’ve had to send them down the pipe to the next clinic because of the overflow. I walked in today and there was probably one of the largest lines I’ve seen at this clinic,” she said.

  The patients are encouraged to pray while awaiting treatment. The staff introduce God as part of what the organization describes as holistic care.

  “We find a lot of people who come to us with a medical need but wouldn’t set foot in the door of a church,” the mobile clinic’s nurse, Lynn Hersey, said. “They want to see if someone who is a Christian can be trusted, if they’re going to shove Jesus down their throat because they ate the bait and came in through the door.”

  Much of Good Samaritan’s work is funded by hospitals trying to keep patients who cannot pay out of emergency rooms, where they must be treated for a crisis by law whether they can pay or not. Those same hospitals have an interest in promoting charity as an alternative to US President Obama’s plans for government to take the lead in getting healthcare to the uninsured.

  Good Samaritan makes no secret of where it stands on the issue; the government has no business involving itself in healthcare. Hersey conceded that the present system can be a tragedy for the poor. What happens to someone with a chronic disease and no insurance? A woman with cancer, say, who might get the surgery she needs thanks to Good Samaritan but not the medicines afterwards. Hersey hesitated.

  “They go without,” she said. You mean they die? “Yes.”

  But Hersey quickly added that where there is no chemotherapy there is still God.

  “Even with the spiritual help they may die, but for those of us who are Christians and believe in God intervening directly in people’s lives, we’ve seen many answers to prayer where medicine falls short. We have seen cancer turn around,” she said.

  For Barnes and Levy, there is no bitterness, only helplessness and suspicion of authority.

  “The government? People who run government don’t care about people like us,” Levy said.

  Banes might have been expected to support Obama as the man most likely to help the poor.

  “I voted for the other guy. McCain. Something grated against me [about Obama]. I really don’t know what it was. I’m not racist. But I went the other way. I don’t really trust the government. The Lord has a plan, and if anything happens, then it’s meant to be,” she said.
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