Mississppi: the hospitality state

Hello from Greenwood, Mississippi!
(...or currently more accurately Itta Bena, MS)

After an extremely busy, stressful and exhausting transition back on campus, we arrived safely in Greenwood, MS for our second SPIKE on Thursday afternoon. We may as well have landed on another continent! The Mississippi Delta is a completely different world than the Gulf Coast.
The first night here we were greeted with a reception hosted by the board of directors of our project. There was food and music and introductions all around. We then moved into our four 2-bedroom apartments! I have an apartment all to myself, and my corps members are living three to an apartment. We feel extremely spoiled by our new sponsors, they are doing everything they can to make us comfortable. After move-in we went shopping and each apartment acted as a little cooking group (leaving me on a very tight very lonely meal budget this weekend).
On Friday we headed over to our new office. The office is just an empty space in a strip mall with a few tables and some chairs. We are hoping to get some computers soon. We met with a man named Dr. Miller who, along with the famous Dr. Shirley, is the main brains behind this operation (to the best of my knowledge). He explained the big picture to us and how we fit in. The hope is to eventually implement a new structure of health care. The plan is modelled after the Iranian health care system. It is a three tiered structure. Tier 1 is a community health house with someone from inside the community trained to do some basic health checks and preventative medicine. At this facility the focus would be things like prenatal care, proper parenting, diabetes testing, blood pressure, weight and height checks, and proper nutrition. Tier 2 would be a clinic with a doctor and/or a licenced nurse practitioner who would handle things like the flu and strep. Finally people could be refer ed up to tier 3, the hospital, for more major and specific needs. The goal of the plan is to provide adequate health care across rural populations, switch American health care over from a curative focus to a preventative focus, and relieve some of the financial burden by cutting down on emergency services. In Iran, this system successfully eliminated the difference in health issues between rural and urban populations.
We fit into this plan as the so-called foot soldiers. Before any new health care plans can be instituted, data needs to be gathered and analyzed. We will be going door to door throughout Greenwood and surveying the population. We will also be administering diabetes tests and checking blood pressure, height and weight. We are also hoping to work with the Board and acting as a bit of a think tank, bouncing ideas back and forth. There is so much potential in this project. My team is so excited! I hope it works out and we can actually get something done for this community.
After our meeting, we headed over to tour the Greenwood Hospital and got to see all kinds of super cool equipment.
Next we toured the city of Greenwood, focusing on the areas we will be surveying. I knew it was going to be bad, but I had no idea how extreme the poverty was here. The city is just like the areas I saw in South Africa. There are dilapidated shotgun houses up and down the streets, some with no plumbing or electricity. The city is over populated and under-supported. The situation is the definition of absolute abject poverty. Families are on a cycle trapping them in this environment with little means or hope to get out or better their community. The most disturbing part is the white neighborhood not five minutes away. Just across the river, still in Greenwood, mansion after mansion after mansion lines the road, a sharp contrast from the neighboring black community. The difference in socioeconomics is based on years and years of institutionalized discrimination based on race and economic status stemming originally from the booming cotton trade in America's cotton capital, Greenwood Mississippi. After the tour, there was one worry I could not get out of my head: how is this community going to react to a bunch of white kids knocking on their doors and asking them extremely personal questions?

Luckily today we had a picnic in Baptist Town, the first neighborhood we will be working in. It was slow to start up, but after a little while some residents started to come out and meet us. The day ended up being extremely successful-people came out for hamburgers and hot dogs and got their blood pressure checked and were tested for diabetes. My team mingled with the adults and painted faces for the kids. The people who came out were wary of us at first but by the end of the picnic, I was feeling a lot better about surveying the community. They seemed to like us and many people ensured that they would get the word out for everyone to welcome us and treat us well.
So far every aspect of our stay here has been unbelievably positive. There is a great deal of work to do, but we have some amazing people supporting us and hopefully when we leave, the community will be a little better off than it is now. I hope that in some way we can empower and motivate the people of this community to step up and help make the changes with in the community that they would like to see. I also hope to start a partnership with AmeriCorps NCCC that will last many years. It is time for America to stop ignoring this population and start working in the right direction. It will be rough, but I hope that we can be part of the change for the better!

Stay Healthy!
Love you all,
Casey