Cultural Reporter Introduction Blog

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 (5^th Edition ed). New York, NY: McGraww-Hill.