Portraits of Our Poverty
Welcome and welcome back 😀! Happy Monday 😎. It's another amazing day in paradise 🌴. Thank you so much for being here 👏.
For those of you who are first time visitors, my name is Kara Lynn "Kai" Sanders. I am a mom. That is my career of choice. On December 23, 2015, I gave birth to an amazing, dynamic, charming, intelligent, handsome young Black man 👏. His name is Wisdom. He is my dream child, gifting me with the career of my dreams.
I am also the C.B.B., Chief Bushel Blaster, for L.U.V. Enterprises. L.U.V. is an acronym for "learn ur value". Our motto is "building the village, raising the child". You can find out more about L.U.V. and the C.B.B. title in this blog post from December 2019.
This week's blog posts will be a little bit different from the norm. Mondays are when I generally release my weekly post called Motivating Monday. Today I am producing two of four different editions that will post this week 😲. There is so much to talk about I don't dare put it all in one post, on one day. The first two posts, starting with this one, will address me, personally (Parts 1 and 2).
On Tuesday I will do another edition speaking specifically about L.U.V., the business. On Wednesday I will share lots of information on Community events to celebrate the upcoming Black Love Day weekend and beyond! It's already long in my head so let's jump right into personal.
Surprise! Surprise! I'm going to talk about me 👋. That might sound strange since, technically, this blog is mine so it's already about "me". It would seem I'm talking about "me" all the time but from the business perspective. Right 😕?
Well... no, not really! 😵 I'm going to get intimately personal, more personal than I have been or normally like to be. I have tried to keep my personal life and my business separate for a while now. That's what you're supposed to do. Right?
At times you will read my blog entries and I'll use "we", speaking collectively of the people who haven't joined me yet (but will). Those were the times I was thinking with my "universal mindset" 😎. Other times I've used "me" or "I" because that is who's here now... ME 😘.
But God has been on my tail lately 😔. Well... for the last little while really. He has been instructing me to stop the separation. So I'm here to talk about me, and about Wisdom too. We're rather inseparable like that.
We have had some pretty fascinating adventures in the last 18 months or so. Some might call them rough, tough, even devastating. I have seen them as our research assignment for God. That doesn't make them not rough, not tough and not devastating. It simply means to me, they have a purpose.
Being on a research assignment for God is not because God doesn't know what's going on. We've been on this journey through poverty to gain clarity on the real reasons why poverty exists. This way I can learn what truly needs to happen to move people from poverty to prosperity, including us.
I have often used the term "research assistants" to describe the role Wisdom and I have played for this project. The truth is we have also, naturally, been its guinea pigs (lab rats if you will). Every experience we have had with poverty is real. It's first hand. It's our story. Here are some pictures from the last 18 months or so to show you!
There were occasions where we slept in our car before it was involved in a car accident. Most nights Wisdom slept on the back seat just fine. I would pile up all the stuff from the back and stack it on the front seat so he would have plenty of room. One night he climbed up front with me. I called it an adventure to sleep in the car. That was how Wisdom saw it too. (Fall/Winter 2019)
When we had a vehicle we were on a mission to visit as many parks as we could. As the weather got colder, I was bound to normalize our experiences as much as possible. Despite my intense aversion to the cold, I braved it for him to enjoy the parks we visited. Wisdom didn't care about the cold. Like most children I don't even think he noticed it. These are pics from a few of those experiences.
This is a very small collection of photos from the seven weeks we spent in a "family shelter". There is a picture of the locker we had for our belongings. We ended up with two because we had so much stuff. Most of the pictures are of Wisdom in various situations: alone, with friends or with me. We slept on cots so there's a pic of him sleeping on one. I have more videos than pics from this time frame. (January-February 2020)
When we left the shelter experience, we spent some time with Wisdom's dad's family. They don't have it much better than we do but they have a roof over their heads and they were willing to share it. I'll forever be grateful for that.
I learned the most about motherhood and parenting while I was there. That's how my life purpose was revealed to me. It is also where I recorded my
From Beggar to Investor Series.
It wasn't at all easy being there though, far from it. We slept in the living room on two couches pushed together. And I often washed clothes by hand and laid them around the room to dry at night while we slept. Those were "the easy parts". (Winter/Spring 2020)
Wisdom is so creative. He would be eating and pull out chips or snacks that resembled smiling/frowning mouths. He wanted to get his pic taken holding them both smiling and frowning. Here are some pics from the collection.
Please note: The summer of 2020 was spent learning and unlearning a lot of lessons. Some of the lessons that were unlearned should not have been. I fell into old habits I thought I had overcome. I made choices unselfishly which didn't work for me or Wisdom in the long run. At the beginning of November 2020, we were unhoused again for the long term.
The lessons were NOT over.
In this set of pictures, Wis is pushing one of two rather small shopping carts with our belongings loaded on them as we left one of the hotels we stayed at for a few nights. This picture was taken around 12:30 in the afternoon.
We eventually traded in the two for one shopping cart Wisdom could ride in. He is sleeping in it under my shawl (and a number of other items to keep him warm). This picture was taken around 12 hours later at approximately 12:30 the next morning. You can view this adventure in this
short collection of videos.
(November 2020)
There was a period of time we lived out of our storage unit. We still had so many adventures though. We met Ms. Alison, an EMT, who introduced us to her co-worker, Mr. Tim, and gave us a tour of their ambulance when Wisdom showed interest after meeting her in the dollar store. He even got to dress up as a firefighter. It is the gear they have to put on when they are called to a fire.
We got to experience lots of interesting things and meet really cool people including the A Place At the Table family. We were reintroduced to them when we were given two meal tokens from a young man named Justin who was clearly homeless himself. We were able to redeem them for two free meals.
While we were there on that visit, we found out that any family with children could eat for free. No tokens would be required. We ate there every time they were open for about three weeks straight. We have eaten almost everything on the menu. They never said a word about it. We were welcome there each and every time. When we stopped showing up they were very curious about our disappearance when we did visit again.
Wis got treats and hugs and so much Love every time we went there. Every once in a while we would get little Love notes too. It was rather cool to have our humanity recognized and be treated with dignity. They helped me remember that my purpose isn't just to "build the village and raise the child", more importantly it is to "bring dignity to poverty".
Living out of our storage unit means we not only hung out there a lot, we often slept there too. It's not heated but thankfully it's not outside either. I once asked Wisdom how he felt about sleeping there. He said He liked it. I made it feel cozy.
On the nights the weather was cold, I used the heater I had stored there. It broke the chill.
We were greatly favored by the new manager. We weren't supposed to sleep there but she also knew we weren't the only ones so she never said anything about it. It was nothing short of a miracle to not be locked out of our storage unit when there should have been an overlock placed on it when the rent was late.
(November/December 2020)
There were a few occasions we were able to secure a hotel room for a night or two to get a shower and fix a meal. But when the money ran out and the night was too cold to sleep in the storage unit, we ended up in the emergency shelter that opened when the temperature fell below 35 degrees at night. We experienced that a total of three times. Here is Wis sleeping on a cot at the church that hosted the shelter. (December 2020)
Our experience at the emergency shelter led us to the temporary stability we enjoyed through the holidays. I was actually told by one of the staff who operated the shelter that Wisdom is who inspired them to move families and seniors over 65 into hotel rooms. That's a pretty humbling realization because when God gave me Wisdom's name, He said it wasn't just going to be for the things he would learn but for the things he would teach.
The man who told me about Wisdom's influence is a doctor. He told me they had been praying, specifically, for wisdom to help unhoused persons. That's when he thought of Wisdom, because he had experienced him firsthand. Just weeks shy of 5 years of life, Wisdom was teaching the decisions makers of the shelter how to truly help people who needed it most. I shared with the doctor how Wisdom got his name and the message that came along with it. He was stunned.
I'm grateful we went and I didn't let my pride get in the way of logic. Generally when it comes down to taking care of Wisdom, my main objective is to keep us safe. On the nights I went sleepless so I could be sure that happened, God protected me during the day by lending me His strength to make it through.
We moved into the hotel the same day I spoke to the doctor. It has been exactly what I needed to get my mind right. Now it's time to move on! I'll talk about how in Part 2.
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