PSO

After a quick dash to the west coast to visit my sister (that's her above at the LA Zoo) and 16-hour blur of roads (12, 22/15, 212, 494, 94, 90, 290, 294, 80/94, 65 ... ahh!) where I felt like that dude from Fight Club whose mind is numbed by the barrage of identical airports, I arrived in Indianapolis for PSO.

Pre-service orientation, better known as PSO, was the first of many bureaucratic acronyms I would come to be famliar with over the next few weeks.

While our training couldn't be site-specific due to the vast variety of job descriptions, it was cool to meet and make connections with soon-to-be VISTAs soon to be serving all across the Midwest.

Mainly PSO was an overview of poverty in America as well as tips on inserting yourself effectively into a new community. We were broken into smaller classrooms by region for most of the week. Everyone in my group was going to serve in Ohio. Some of the info was basic and obvious but it was rarely boring thanks to lots of interactive group activities, which made it as interesting as it could have been.

Also cool and very unexpected was the fact that my group leader turned out to be a South Dakotan hailing from a small town near where I worked and also a South Dakota State journalism graduate familiar with the paper I worked for! What a small world.

With people from vastly different ages and backgrounds -- a single mother with a drug-addicted sister and a recent college grad from an affluent suberb, just to name two -- there were lots of varied viewpoints, which made for interesting discussion.

One of the most eye-opening statistics presented was one related to the difference between situational poverty (those who've lost their jobs or gotten swamped by medical bills) vs. generational poverty (those whose families have been in poverty for two or more generations). SEVENTY-FIVE percent of Americans in poverty are in generational poverty. Wow. That sparked one of the most thought-provoking discussions of the week: Whether urban or rural poverty is more pervasive.

My group seemed to be pretty well-read and so I also got some good book recommendations, including The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, a memoir about growing up in extreme poverty in West Virginia.

Highlights of our free evenings included a hole-in-the-wall jazz bar where I talked to new friends for hours and my first NFL (preseason) game -- for $10 scalped tickets in the Colts' gorgeous new stadium that was literally steps from my hotel. (In the photo below, the column on the left side is my hotel.)





Sidenote: A neatly dressed but clearly down-and-out older woman approached me in the press of the football game crowd asking for money, saying she was hungry. Reflexively I brushed her off, but after she walked away, I stopped short. How ironic. How was I supposed to callously say no after an entire day of talking about hunger and poverty in the abstract and here it was right in the flesh? (Maybe it was a test from Americorps? Kidding.) When I tracked her down and handed her $5, she hugged me. I did contemplate pointing her in the direction of the convention center where all the bleeding heart soon-to-be VISTAs fresh off a day of poverty simulations would have been a great source of income ;)

We VISTAs, on the other hand, stayed in posh hotels and were fed ridiculous amounts of extravagent food. (I thought the government was broke?) But joking aside, it was an inspiring pep talk for the trenches we would all be entering bright and early the very next Monday.

On the last day, we took a pledge (which the always-enlightening Glenn Beck mocked earlier this year:

And, just like that, we were VISTAs.