Breathitt County, KY

As I was reading this article I was immediately struck at the mention of Breathitt County. I've participated in the Appalachia Service Project (ASP) for the past couple years. This program takes groups from all of the United States and places them in various counties in the Appalachia region. Each group spends one week living at a center with other volunteer groups and working on the home of a family or individual in the county. Two summers ago I traveled with a group of teenagers and leaders to Breathitt County, Kentucky. When Ungar mentioned this county I tried to think about my experience in the county and what similarities I could draw between what she writes about and what I experienced first hand. Each time I go on ASP I'm immediately reminded of why I love the program and how much one person can actually do. This isn't an organization made up entirely of people who dedicate they're lives to working to fix the poverty issues in these Appalachian regions. While ASP does employ full-time employees, the volunteers are just that, volunteers. They're people who all over the country and have families, careers and full-time obligations. The beauty of ASP is that it gives everyone the opportunity to help, all you need is to be able to donate a week of your time.
My experience in Breathitt county is one that I will never forget. My work crew and I, which was made up of two adults and four other teenagers spent the week working on the home of an amazing family, which consisted of a mom, dad, daughter and two sons. They lived in a rural community to which we had to take many winding dirt roads, and couldn't even see their nearest neighbor. The ASP staff members, who spend the whole summer at a specific sight and coordinate all the programs of the different houses for the summer worked with us to identify the most immediate needs of the home. Our project for the week was their bathroom. The floor was unleveled and rotted through. The ceiling constantly leaked. The tub was sinking into the rotted floor boards, and they had no running water. By the end of our five days, our seven person work crew had been able to rip out the entire floor (including the supports), lay a whole new floor, fix the bathtub, build a vanity/sink unit, and give them their first flush toilet in over five years. Seeing these changes in such a short amount of time, and getting to know the family, connect with them and see how much having the things that we consider necessities means to them was priceless. Yet at the same time it was hard to know that there were still so many more problems that needed to be fixed, and while I wouldn't be able to help, hopefully the groups in the following weeks would be able to. One of these issues which most directly relates to the health issues is that they had no kind of sewer system, no septic tank, the waste just went underground. This creates a toxic and deadly environment of 'black water' under their house. This is a similar issue to those that we've mentioned in third world and developing nations; how it would be more helpful to provide sanitary living environment and clean water over any vaccine.
It's hard to imagine people living in the United States without running water, living in an area devastated by poverty, and I think that until you see it first hand, it's almost impossible to imagine. Living in a very urban area all of my life, it was difficult for me to imagine the stark differences between the urban poor and the rural poor. A lot of people think of poverty as poverty, and don't even notice a difference. I think the article does a good job of being aware of the fact that there is indeed a difference. While many of the problems are the same and poverty in a country with as much money and resources as we have needs to be dealt with, they had to be handled in a different way because the issues that effect those in the city are different from those that people in rural communities.
There's not an easy fix to the problem, it runs much deeper than people simply being unemployed. Before you can truly fix the poverty, you have to fix the economy. If there are no jobs, no businesses, no stable economy, there's no way for people to make money. I think another very important point that follows from this is the need for community based businesses. Putting more McDonald's in Breathitt county isn't going to fix their economy problems. There needs to be money being made in the community, that stays in the community. All the issues mentioned in the article, including healthcare, are things that aren't going to be fixed over night, or even in the near future, but something has to be done and a change needs to be made, immediately.