Car Tires: New, Used or Rental?

Rochelle was going to meet me at my house for an interview at 9:30 a.m. First she had to drop her kids off at school and buy a tire for her car. Nothing goes smoothly in Rochelle’s life so I expected I would hear from her telling me she would be late. She texted me at 9:00. She would be an hour late. She texted me slightly before 10:30 and spilled out the more complicated problem: She had bought a tire the day before, but it was “messed up,” so she had gone back to the tire store to get it replaced. I suspected it was even more complicated than that, and it was. She had bought a used tire. The store did not have another used tire to replace the defective one, and she didn’t have enough money for a new tire. She asked me if I knew any place to buy tires. I did, however I buy new tires. I suggested we meet at a Goodyear tire store near my house. That was about a twenty-minute drive from where she was.

This is a blog about poverty. The real tire problem was that though Rochelle badly needed a tire, she couldn’t afford one. Her solution was to buy a used tire from a store she had never dealt with before. The price of the “messed up” used tire had been $75. Rochelle met me at the Goodyear store. She had been refunded her $75, but a new tire was going to cost $165, inclusive of labor and tax. Rochelle didn’t have that much money. I said I could give her $60 for that day’s interview and the next interview, but she would still be $30 short. Rochelle had recently had her thirty-eighth birthday. I decided I would make up the $30 and call it her birthday present. The tire problem for today was solved. That was problem #1 of the day.

The next question, problem #2, was when would the car be ready. Rochelle had to pick up her fourteen year old daughter from school at 3:30. The car would be ready “by the end of the day,” said the Goodyear employee. The car wasn’t ready until slightly after closing. By then it was rush hour. What was a twenty-minute drive without traffic became a forty-five minute drive and the daughter had already been waiting at the school for two hours. I could have driven Rochelle to pick up her daughter at 3:30, but then it was questionable if we could get back to the tire store before closing. Then Rochelle would have no car to transport her children to school and herself to work the next day. So I decided it was better to wait until the car was ready before picking up the daughter. Rochelle’s daughter could watch her brother practice for that evening’s school football game. So her daughter had to wait, which upset Rochelle, but she finally had a new tire.

Rochelle’s life isn’t easy. Everyone hates buying tires. They are expensive and some people can’t afford them. For that reason there is a market for used tires. They can be safe to buy if you know and trust the dealer, but buying them can be dangerous if you don’t. There are also tire rental stores for people who just want to have their car pass the required state safety inspection. Poverty presents problems on a daily basis that many people aren’t even aware of. This is Rochelle’s life.

No Guidance

Rochelle’s eldest daughter is out of school and working. While in her senior year in high school she had moved in with her boyfriend. Three years later she is mostly living at her mother’s apartment but still has the same boyfriend. He lives nearby in his own apartment. Her job is with a company that provides security for other businesses. I’m not exactly sure what her job responsibilities are, but it requires monitoring cameras. She likes the job and the hours. It pays almost as much as her mother’s job with the grocery store, where Rochelle has been for nine years.

The two younger children are fourteen and sixteen. The youngest wants to go to college. Ohio State is his pick because of their football team. The sixteen year old says she doesn’t want to have children because they are expensive and a lot of trouble. She hasn’t been counseled about birth control. I often have wondered if Rochelle had any dreams for her kids. In our first interview she had said she wanted to break the generational poverty her family was tied to, but she had given no specifics as to how she was going to achieve that goal. Now, nine years after that first interview, I saw her eldest following in Rochelle’s path. A couple of weeks ago I decided to ask her what kind of life she would like for her children to have as they moved into adulthood. She appeared to be quite unprepared for the question.

The question surprised Rochelle, I think, because she had never thought much about it. “I don’t want them to get pregnant before they can afford children; I want them to go to college; I don’t want them to get into debt like I did,” Rochelle answered after some thought. “My oldest one wants credit cards. I keep telling her to look at the mess I am in,” she said. “My life has been hard. I wasn’t ready for children, I had no money, and I am so deep in debt I don’t know if I can ever get out.” I again asked her why, if these were the goals she had for her children, she had never counseled her children about pregnancy and birth control. Her eldest daughter is still not using birth control, and the boyfriend is on disability. He has no steady job. Rochelle had no answer.

The goals Rochelle has for her children seem to be to not do the things she has done that have resulted in her difficult life. “I mostly tell them not to live how I have lived,” she said. She never mentioned how she had guided them otherwise, or if she had talked with them about what they would like their lives to be like as they became adults. There seemed to be no discussions of positive role models or good paths to take. No discussion of goal making and how to reach those goals. I know Rochelle made a “Vision Board” for herself, not too long ago, which set her goals down on a large poster. It was artistic and I thought it was a great idea. She showed it to me proudly. It wasn’t long before she lost her motivation. Just as it seems she has already lost her motivation for continuing her diet. Life get in the way. It takes a long time to achieve goals. Rochelle too had not been taught how to make and reach long-term goals. She said she had no role models. No friends or relatives she could look to who had successful lives. ” I’m overwhelmed,” she said. And she is.

COVID and Black Poverty in 2022. Rochelle Six Years Later

I last posted about Rochelle exactly six years ago. We’ve kept in touch but until last week, during the past two years of COVID, we had seen each other only once. Even after the vaccine became available Rochelle refused to get herself and her children vaccinated. She still works at the grocery store and is very much susceptible to the virus. When I asked her why she wouldn’t get it, she just said the vaccine was too new. Rochelle gets her information from her friends and social media. Both are filled with misinformation. This past February she and her children finally got vaccinated. A week after their first shots they all were diagnosed with COVID, except for the eldest daughter who then lived with her boyfriend. Rochelle was quite sick, though the children were less ill . After the appropriate amount of time had passed they all got their second vaccinations. Vaccinations are available every day at the grocery store where she works. Rochelle’s company encourages its employees to get the shot. She and her children were the only people I knew who were unvaccinated. Now that she is vaccinated we’ve seen each other twice. This past week I actually interviewed her again, with pay, so I could update this blog. Look for another post within the next week or so. Much is the same, but much has changed.

Still Moving Forward- One Step At A Time

It has been over a year since I have posted anything about Rochelle. I stopped interviewing her on a weekly basis so there was less to report, and her life has calmed down somewhat. Her car has continued to work, but more importantly she has remained employed at the grocery store chain; she is moving forward and upwards in the company. Just a week ago she graduated from their management training school. It was a 12 week program made for upwardly mobile hourly employees. The company has a more advanced management training program for those employees who are ready to go into salaried executive positions. This program is usually reserved for those with college degrees, but Rochelle tells me that one can also be accepted if one is already working for the company and shows great promise. She hopes for that in the future.

Upon graduation Rochelle was promoted from supervisor of cashiers to manager of cashiers; she received two raises and was moved to a new store. Her new store is small with fewer employees than she is used to, but this makes her a big fish in a small pond; she may be able to effect positive change more swiftly in a store like this. According to Rochelle, the store does need some changes and many of the managers are new, including the store manager. Just in the short time she has been there she has seen areas that need some tweaking and is working towards implementing needed changes.

I had a congratulatory lunch with Rochelle a couple of days ago; now she is a person working in a career with goals for the future. She has come a very long way since I first started interviewing her. She seems excited about her future.

Rochelle still doesn’t make much money, though she has had many raises. Three children are expensive for everyone. Nevertheless, her paycheck is paying for more of her expenses. She no longer receives food stamps, and for reasons other than her income, she no longer receives disability for her eldest daughter. Her daughter was born with seizures at birth but has been seizure free for two years. Rochelle purchased health insurance for herself through her company in January and is contributing to their retirement program as well. She does, however, still receive section #8 housing vouchers, and her children’s health insurance is still covered by Medicaid. Though Rochelle is earning more, losing the food stamps and the disability payments makes it so she really is not living on more money. Rochelle’s on going goal has been to break the poverty cycle her family has been caught up in for generations. She is successfully moving in that direction. I am very proud of her and she is proud of herself.

Charter Schools

 I’ve had lunch with Rochelle twice since we stopped having our weekly interviews. Her children have started school for the fall season, and now all three are enrolled in charter schools. The 12-year-old daughter attends a separate charter school from her two younger siblings since she is now in middle school. Somehow I hadn’t heard about the change for the younger ones; when Rochelle mentioned it as we were having lunch on the first day of school, I was quite surprised.  The eldest, Kalinda, had been quickly pulled from her regular school a couple of weeks into the school year last fall. She had started the 6^th grade in middle school and had received threats of violence via Facebook . Rochelle had expressed concern about this middle school well in advance of her daughter’s attending it.  6^th grade at the new charter school had gone well for Kalinda last year, though she tested at a lower level than was average for 6^th grade. She was put in a class that met her education level and she completed the year with no other problems. This year she is enrolled in volleyball as an after school activity.

Work is still going well for Rochelle. The grocery store was hosting a major visit by corporate bigwigs a few weeks ago, and Rochelle got very stressed when she was asked to participate in the “walk-through” of her area of responsibility. I told her this was her chance to shine and she would do fine. She had never been in any situation requiring managerial responsibility before, so this was very new for her. She had seen visits from high-level managers at the department store we both worked for several years ago, but those “walk-throughs” had not really been a concern for people in sales positions.  When we met for lunch I asked her how it had gone; she went into great detail, telling me what she had been asked and how she had answered the questions. She was quite proud of herself, and it sounded to me as if she had done a great job. The experience has built her confidence and allowed her to put another plank in the platform she can use for future advancement.

Rochelle now has another car. It was purchased from the same place she had bought her previous car, though that one had been a true lemon. With no credit, Rochelle had no choice. This time, however, she did ask them why so many customers were on record as having bought bad cars from them. She did not tell them about all the problems she had had with her previous purchase because she was trading it in toward her new car. The fact of the matter was that the car dealership had already received far more money from Rochelle than the car had been worth, at a 24.99% interest rate, and the dealership was more than happy to sell her another one at the same inflated price and interest rate. People in Rochelle’s situation are the people who make up this dealership’s customer base.

I’ve told Rochelle to call me for lunch and a visit every few weeks so she can let me know how she is doing. Rochelle, herself, had suggested that it was probably time for the interviews and the subsidy that went with them to come to an end. They had begun as a way of supplementing her minimum wage job at the group home, and then the subsidy was increased so that she could afford to take the job at the grocery store that had a better hourly wage and much more scope for advancement, but that was not initially full-time. Now that the job is full-time, and Rochelle has received several raises and promotions, she felt that she should stand on her own two economic feet. We did, however, decide to continue a portion of the subsidy, to be deposited monthly into Rochelle’s first savings account.  Rochelle has a job, a car, possibly even a career to move forward with. Things are somewhat more hopeful than they were when we started the interviews two years ago. But now, her daughter’s teenage years are quickly approaching. I think this is going to become a real challenge for Rochelle.

The Last Interview; Has Anything Changed?

I interviewed Rochelle for the last time yesterday. She has been coming into my living room on a weekly basis for almost two years for an hour-long interview, and we have become good friends. “You know more about me than anyone,” she told me. “I usually keep all this stuff to myself.”

In Meet Rochelle, the introduction to this blog, we explain why this project got started. Now it is over. The original and most immediate purpose of the interviews was to provide Rochelle with a dignified way of making a little extra money when she was working at a part-time job for minimum wage. We also hoped that her story might be a useful tool in informing more privileged people about what life is like in the culture of poverty. Now that Rochelle has reached something of a plateau,  it is hard not to evaluate where she is today as opposed to where she was in her life two years ago. We started by discussing teenage pregnancy, and we spent part of our last interview with that discussion again.

My first question to Rochelle almost two years ago was to ask why she had continued not to use birth control even though she had delivered her first child while still in high school without support from the father. Two years ago Rochelle was not really sure of the answer. Now, she is really not sure how she is going to prevent the same thing from happening to her daughters. Though she is supervising her children much more closely than her mother supervised her and her siblings, she doesn’t seem to understand that it will take much more than that to prevent her daughters from becoming pregnant too early and to prevent her son from impregnating someone at a young age. Part of this is probably due to the fact that early pregnancy, without male support, is the rule rather than the exception in the world Rochelle and her children inhabit. Some of it is probably due to Rochelle’s lack of understanding of the complex of factors that resulted in her early pregnancy, and that will probably cause the same thing for her daughters. It is also due to the starvation Rochelle felt as a teenager, and her children feel now, for affection, approval, and acceptance, a hunger for which a teenage boy seems like a perfect solution. Finally, if Rochelle’s daughters have no future to protect, as Rochelle did not at 16, they will see no reason not to get pregnant, especially if all around them their friends are doing just that.We have discussed the need for goals in life, and Rochelle now has some for herself, but I am not at all sure she is confident about being able to develop goals for her children’s lives.

So, two years later, Rochelle has a much better job. She has gone from $7.25/hr and working part-time in a dead end position to $11.25/hr and working full-time on the promotion path in a new company. She has been there over a year and qualifies for benefits. She has graduated from the company’s beginning management classes and is preparing to enter their official management school next year. This is a truly positive difference in Rochelle’s life from where she was when I started interviewing her.

Rochelle is also developing a relationship with a credit union so that she might improve her credit score and be able to function within a normal banking system instead of the payday loans, finance companies, and sub-prime car dealerships she currently is forced to deal with. Unfortunately, after our last interview ended, she was going directly to the sub-prime car dealership she had bought her last car from in order to trade it in on another car. This time, however, she has in her hand all the customer complaints recently levied against the company, and she will go in with her eyes wide open and questions to ask. Her current car, as blog readers will already know, was a lemon. “I change the oil every 3,000 miles,” Rochelle had always said when new problems developed. “It is just a bad car,” I would tell her.

Rochelle is still poor; she still has car problems and credit problems; and her mother’s health will not be improving. But the most troubling thing is that despite our discussions of teenage pregnancy and how it has affected her life, she still has not discussed sex and early pregnancy with her 12-year-old daughter; the probability of breaking the cycle of poverty in this generation seems unlikely. Rochelle’s problems are just too complex for her to overcome by herself; addressing all the problems is overwhelming. Still, to have a job that is turning into a career is a big step forward for her.

I will still be seeing Rochelle for lunch every month. Perhaps the blog is really not ending yet. Perhaps I will log in for new posts after our monthly lunches.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Preventing Teenage Pregnancy: Breaking the Poverty Cycle

I have been interviewing Rochelle for well over a year, and I wondered how her thinking about teenage pregnancy had changed over that time. I wondered if there had been any change at all. Her eldest daughter just turned 12 this month and is in middle school. When we first discussed it, Rochelle had said she thought her daughter was too young for a conversation about sex, even though Rochelle’s own sister had a baby at 14 and Rochelle had a baby at 17. Her daughter was 10 at the time. Over the last year and a half I had brought the subject up a few times, but it never went very far. Rochelle said she knew she needed to have “the talk,” but either thought her daughter was too young, or she thought the school would handle it. Her answer to the same question was very different when I again raised it a couple of days ago. We have only two more interviews until our agreed upon interview period is over, and I wanted to see what she now said.  “I think everything will be fine,” she told me. “My children have adult supervision at all times. My sisters and I didn’t; and we had a mama who was bringing different men home all the time. I don’t do that; I’m raising my children better than that,” she emphasized. “Anyway, black people just do things differently from white people,” she told me. In Rochelle’s world, having a baby or several babies while still in your teen years is more common than not. She talks about wanting to break the cycle of poverty that her family has experienced for generations, but still doesn’t seem to understand how becoming a teenaged mother has contributed to this cycle. One hundred percent of her female relatives had become mothers while in their teens. One hundred percent of her relatives that I am aware of are living in the culture of poverty. Her eldest sister is not on government assistance, but her family of six, plus a relative’s baby, live in a cramped two bedroom apartment.

“Adult supervision is good and needed,” I told her. “But it is not enough. What will happen when your children start dating?” “They don’t date now,” Rochelle said. I told her I thought she was also uncomfortable about having “the talk” with her daughter. “Yes, I am uncomfortable,” Rochelle said, “The school will handle it.” “That didn’t stop your sisters or you from becoming pregnant,” I replied. “But I’m supervising my children, and I don’t bring men home like Mama did,” she repeated. “If you are going to break the cycle of poverty in your family, you’re going to have to stop teen pregnancy in your family,” I said. And then we moved on to other subjects such as how her job is going.

Her job is going well. Next week she will graduate from her work sponsored management-training program. She had given her “final exam” which was a five-minute presentation of what she had learned and how she was going to use the knowledge going forward. In that presentation she held up a magnet I had given her, which said: “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?”   Several of the managers who were watching her presentation came up to her later and said they loved the quote. “I think I did good,” Rochelle said. She is comfortable talking about her progress at work, but not about the subject of teen pregnancy. A year and a half ago she could just think it wouldn’t happen to her children, but now, with her daughter reaching puberty, she is still so uncomfortable with the idea of discussing sex with her daughter that she cannot bring herself to deal with the problem. Clearly, despite Rochelle’s hard work and impressive successes at work, the power of the culture she grew up in continues to exert its influences.

College Ahead

“Danyell’s going to college,” Rochelle told me several months ago. Danyell is her eldest sister’s first child, who was born when her mother was 14. Rochelle’s sister dropped out of high school, had another child with the father of the first, then married a man and had three more children. She is recently divorced from the father of the three youngest children. Danyell is going to first go to the local community college and then her plans are to transfer to a state college thirty miles away. Yesterday was graduation day and Rochelle and her family went. Rochelle is the only one to have graduated from high school in her immediate family; now the eldest cousin of Rochelle’s children has graduated from high school and is going to college. Danyell’s mother has had a stable job as a receptionist at a pediatric center for many years and her ex-husband also has had a stable job. He had been living with the family since the two older children were young. It seems to have made a huge difference in the lives of the children. Though now divorced, he is still a factor in this family’s life.

This week I will ask Rochelle about the graduation and what her children thought about it. When I first was learning about the family dynamics I thought Mary-Jane, the eldest sister, would have been the one to have had the most difficult life. She wasn’t because she had a stable job and was not a single mother. Five children isn’t easy for anyone, especially when the first was born when the mother was only 14, but she has made it work so far. Currently she is not on any public assistance and hasn’t been since she married the father of her youngest three children. Having a help-mate in the family has made all the difference in the world.