Cultural
Introduction Blog
From
the day I moved to the U.S. I have witnessed homeless people lying on the
streets ever since I can remember. Back then I was only at the age of 10, so it
was indifferent to me when I saw a withered man dressed in clothes filled with
holes and dirt, holding a cardboard sign asking for help. To this day, I will
never forget the first homeless guy I saw. It’s difficult to do so if you had
to walk past him everyday to and from school. My curiosity was just growing and
growing as I saw more homeless people on the streets of Chicago. I was taught
not to speak to that one particular helpless man and just to walk to my
destination, minding my own business. Many questions were brewing in my head.
Why is he living on the streets? What happened to him? Where is his family?
Doesn’t he get cold at night? Where does he get food if he has no money? Why is
there barely any money in what is suppose to be his money jar? Why isn’t
anybody helping him? Is it legal to sit on the sidewalks where people have to
walk in? I had no inclination to find the answers to my questions until I had
gotten older and my knowledge of the U.S. economy, society, politics, class and
culture had increased.
Class
identity is defined as a sense of belonging to a group that shares similar
economic, occupational, or social status (Martin & Nakayama, 2009). Class
is a very important issue in the U.S. because it translates through nonverbal
and verbal communication. A man walking down Wall Street in Manhattan, dressed
in a tailored designer suit, talking on his Blackberry would not be considered
the working class. Just by looking at his attire is a sign of nonverbal
communication. A verbal communication would be the way a person who lives in a
trailer park would speak versus the man walking down Wall Street. Homeless
people are not just in big cities in the U.S., but they are also here, in our
very own city of Lincoln. They come from a wide variety of backgrounds and
become homeless for a variety of reasons. There are the economic factors such
as unemployment, poverty, unaffordable hosing; and social and medical factors
like domestic violence, mental/drug issues, lack of health care just to name a
few. The most recent Point In Time count was designed to measure the extent of
homelessness in the community on a single day. The face of homelessness in
Lincoln was 834 people in 621 households, nearly 1/3 were children under the
age of 19, 8% were U.S. Military Veterans, 22% of the households were
chronically homeless (Homelessness In Lincoln).
This video is the personal stories of the people that were affected by the homeless people in Lincoln. It was made by the Human Services Federation: Religious Affinity Group.
My
objective is to research further into the culture of homelessness by
participating at People’s City Mission right here in downtown Lincoln. I will
conduct my research by interviewing the volunteers of People’s City Mission and
the homeless people, discovering further on the theories and concepts on this
certain class identity, and the effect on the culture shock among many others.
References:
"Homelessness In Lincoln." Lincoln Homeless
Coalition. Web. 7 Feb. 2012. <http://www.lincolnhomelesscoalition.org/homelessness-awareness/>.
Martin, J.N., & Nakayama, T.K. (2009). Intercultural Communication in Contexts (5th
Edition ed). New York, NY: McGraww-Hill.
