But there are no poor people in our county.

The first time I heard that phrase was from an elderly woman in my church. I had asked if I could have some of the quilts that our church women make to send to mission programs over seas. "After all, I explained, "It's alot colder here than it is in Africa." She looked at me with a puzzled face. "But there are no poor people in our county. I've lived here all my life and I've never seen any" she replied.



I told her if that was the case than I and my fellow workers at Social Services would have been out of a job years ago. The truth of there being poor in our area slowly dawned on her and I've been getting quilts from the church on a regular basis for several years now.



The poor in the rural areas are not as visible as they are in the urban areas. You don't see people sleeping under highway overpasses. But, you say, there are no highway overpasses here. Yeah, yeah and you don't see people pushing shopping carts full of all their possessions or any "projects" like you do in the big city. So where are the rural poor?



Most of the poor in rural areas keep to themselves. Aside from going to the grocery store and the social service office you don't see them around much. They don't have their kids in sports or band programs (could it be they can't afford the cost of equipment or instruments?), they don't often attend parent/teacher conferences, you won't see them in the Rotary, Lions or Kiwanas. You may not realize that the gal down the street is a "poor" person and not just a strange loner type person.



I can guarantee that our kids know who the poor kids are in school. They are the ones who wear the same 2 shirts to school or have the bad haircuts.



I have a worker in my office who has lived in this county for all of her40+ years. She has a case load of about 190 households. When she was a new worker she would often comment to me that she thought she knew just about everyone in this town, but can't believe the number of people that she now has as clients that she never knew were out there.

We have one low income housing "project" that has about 50 townhomes and a trailer court that obviously does not require alot of money to live in, but the poor are much more spread out throughout the whole county.
Many of our most poor people don't live in our "big" city of 7,000, they are out in the isolated, old farm houses or in the smaller communities of 50-300 people. Rent is so much cheaper when the house is run down and there are no zoning laws to make the landlord have to bring a dwelling up to code. When you're poor, living 20 miles from town and have a car that barely moves, you don't get out too much.

I once delivered Christmas meals to some of the needy people in our town. I took my youngest son, who are about 8 at the time along with me.
He was shocked when we went to several houses that were within walking distance from our own house. "Mom," he said " these houses look like any of the other houses on the outside, but on the inside they are dumps. They are falling apart and there's no furniture. I never knew these people were poor."

Our county claims 21,000 residents. Our case load at the "welfare" office is over 1,600 households. A household could be one, two, or however many people happen to be in that family. I would bet that there are a lot of people in our county who would qualify for "welfare" but for their own reasons haven't applied.

So you think there are no poor people in our county? Think again.