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Beyond the Statistics: Stories of Struggle
By Mark Guydish, The Times Leader
August 21, 2005
This is not about poverty. It's about people. People beyond urban decay and suburban sprawl, tucked into trailers alongside the road, or in old homes among the wooded hills, or surviving in the ragged shells of villages that once bustled with business and promise.
It's about Luther Burd looking to a gray February sky and hoping for enough snow to make a few bucks plowing neighbors' driveways with a 1966 Jeep. It's about Debbie Milbrodt resorting to used clothes and cheap hot dogs for her kids after an illness hobbled her husband. It's about John Muntz mortgaging his house to buy a car and selling prescription drugs to pay taxes.
This is about Harriet Hess helping her ailing husband of 55 years into a worn rocking chair on a weathered porch, sitting next to him and vowing, as they grasp hands, to take care of him, come what may.
Proud and determined to remain self-sufficient, they live in rural isolation, camouflaged by wealthy neighbors in eye-catching mini-mansions. They disappear in the rustic landscape. Unlike struggling city dwellers clustered in deteriorating tenements or declining neighborhoods, these people seem invisible, often forgotten, easily overlooked and always with us.
Just what is rural?
They can be hard to find, and that may be both boon and bane. They opt for and revel in a secluded life, but if trouble strikes, the seclusion becomes a barrier between them and what they need. The Times Leader spent nearly a year periodically driving the back roads of Luzerne and Wyoming counties, looking for people willing to tell their stories.
There are several ways to define rural. For this series we chose one used by the Center for Rural Pennsylvania: a municipality with fewer than 274 people per square mile.
According to the 2000 U.S. Census, slightly more than one-tenth of Luzerne County's 319,000 residents officially live in poverty. The census did not break down the numbers into rural and urban, but Times Leader research shows that 22 percent of the county's people live in rural areas, and 16 percent of the poor live there.
Put another way, of roughly 35,000 Luzerne County residents living in poverty, about 6,000 struggle in the countryside.
The numbers are different for the much more sparsely populated Wyoming County, where nearly 80 percent of the 28,000 residents live in rural areas. The poverty rate is slightly lower than Luzerne County: a bit more than 10 percent, but the vast majority of the Wyoming County poor are rural: 82 percent, roughly 2,400 people.
But that's a statistical charade. The U.S. Census defines poverty by looking at household income, how many people live there, and how old they are. In a home with two parents and two children under 18, the poverty level in 2004 was $19,157. For a single person over age 65 - a common scenario as children leave home and the spouse dies - the poverty level is a scant $9,060.
The truth, as anyone who works with those in need can tell you, is that hardship starts long before income drops to the poverty level. Take John and Bette Muntz, whom you'll meet in this series. Their combined Social Security and disability income hovers near $19,000, well above the official poverty level of $11,418 for a couple in their late 60s.
The Muntzes each have multiple health problems requiring frequent medical attention and numerous daily drugs, all of which means they can't afford to be without insurance beyond what Medicare covers. Their premiums total nearly $400 a month, wiping out almost all of Bette's income.
Add the need for a reliable car - an option in cities but a must in the country - the constant cost of maintaining and heating a house, property taxes, and inevitable emergencies, and it's easy to see why the Muntzes ran up credit card debt, remortgaged the house they had owned free and clear, and decided John would go back to work part-time driving a school bus, even though walking is so difficult he spends most of his home life in a single room in their small house.
There are, of course, many people with similar problems in the area's cities and boroughs. But there are two big differences. First, city dwellers struggling with money are more visible, easier for social service agencies to find and help. In the country, they are often hidden along dirt roads, shadowed by trees, folded in among the rolling mountains.
As Town Hill United Methodist Pastor Steve Atanasoff pointed out, in the country, "The problem is much more pervasive than people realize."
Second, it is easier to get needed help in the city. Social services are typically headquartered there. Public transportation is available. And it costs less money for a social service agency to send help. Luzerne/Wyoming County Bureau for the Aging Executive Director Carol Lewis offered one example.
"The cost is much higher to serve rural people than urban people. If you have six people who all need personal care and are all in a high-rise, one person can stop there and help them all in one afternoon." Scatter those same people across remote rural areas and it takes a day just to visit one or two.
The Rev. Keith Benjamin knows the difference personally. Before his current position as pastor at First United Methodist Church in Wilkes-Barre, he spent eight years heading the United Methodist church in Noxen Township, Wyoming County. With more than 17 percent of its people living below the poverty rate, Noxen ranks as one of the poorest rural municipalities in the two counties.
"The real struggle out there," Benjamin said, "is the remoteness. It inflicts itself on people."
It's often country isolation
How? Consider the Bureau of Aging "Meals on Wheels" program. City dwellers who participate get a hot meal delivered to their door daily. In the country, Lewis noted, that's not practical.
"We just could not depend on volunteers to deliver hot meals every day," Lewis said. "You can do it in a city but just can't cover two counties that way." The solution: six frozen meals delivered once a week.
There is no similar shortcut when it comes to some critical medical treatments. Take dialysis, the process of cleansing the blood for patients with kidney failure. Typically, a patient must visit a dialysis center three times a week for up to four hours each time. Missing a treatment can mean death.
For city dwellers, the trip is short, transportation generally easy to come by. For rural residents, it can mean long journeys that eat up a chunk of a day or cost a fortune. United Way of Wyoming Valley President David Lee said his agency helps fund transportation reimbursements through the Dialysis Patient's Association of Northeast Pa.
A country setting and low income can be a psychological cage as well as a physical barrier, particularly for women caught in abusive relationships. "The services are few and far between," said the Rev. Karen Allen, pastor of First United Methodist Church in Shickshinny. "They are not only isolated because of the relationship, they are isolated because of the area."
Perhaps ironically, that isolation can shatter confidentiality, Allen added. In a town, when a social worker parks near your house he or she is parking near every house on the block. In the country, it's obvious who is getting a visit.
"So a neighbor comes up to you and says, 'oh, I saw Pastor Karen's car by your house the other day. What's the matter?' "
Rural isolation means fewer opportunities for socialization, among children and adults. Cathie Pauley, a Noxen native and advocate you'll learn more about in this series, put it this way: "In the cities, you have some funding. You have the YMCA, someplace you can go. We had to find something affordable, and even when you have it, it's hard to get kids to take advantage of it."
One solution was conversion of an old school into a community center where Pauley and others spend countless hours volunteering - which, she points out, is an activity unto itself. "You take the driver's license away from these little old ladies and they would shrivel up and die. . If they can't get out to volunteer for whatever, they just die."
Even at home, rural residents typically have fewer diversions and sources of public information. According to the Center for Rural Pennsylvania, there are fewer radio stations in rural areas than urban: six per 1,000 square miles versus 15 per 1,000. Television stations are even sparser: Seven stations per 1,000 square miles in rural areas compared to 44 in urban areas.
Cable and satellite hookups can bridge that gap, but for those struggling to stretch tuna and noodles into a week's menu, that's not an option. For this series, we interviewed Jason and Diana Dietz, a young couple raising a 2-year-old daughter on a single, modest income. The only TV reception they get is what comes over the airwaves for free. "We just live as basic as possible," Diana said.
Jason gave up a lucrative job in Florida because it affected his health. In fact, everyone interviewed for this series lives where and how they live by choice. It may not have turned out the way they expected, they may have stumbled onto hard times through injury, illness or bad luck, but they've decided to stay where they are and work things out.
That may be the strongest thread connecting people struggling in our rural communities. Those who work with them will grow stern if you misinterpret what these people are about. They are not stereotypes.
They are not slack-jawed, gap-toothed yokels in patched coveralls who never got the hang of success. They are people who got jobs, built lives and at some point saw much of it slip away, often through no fault of their own.
People like Atanasoff of Town Hill church will tell you these folks strive mightily to maintain dignity in the face of their isolation and adversity.
They will tell you, as former Noxen minister Benjamin noted, that it is rarely a question of effort or intent that separates the successful from the struggling. It is most often a question of luck. Where you get your first job, what work is available when you get laid off, how your health holds up.
"You feel your life is out of control," Benjamin said, "and it really is. It's randomness."
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