After being unemployed for 285 days, I have a special connection when I give my $10 to someone out of work. According to data released by the US Department of Labor yesterday, unemployment has risen to 9.8% from 9.6% where it had hovered since August. That represents 15.1 million people who can not find work. The good news is that we are slightly better off than we were in 2009 at this time when there was 10% unemployment which accounted for 15.4 million people out of work.
Phiona is one of the 15.1 million people searching for work in this country. She has been unemployed for five months now. Back in February I recall that the average duration of unemployment was 7.5 months. I tried to find what it is at now, but couldn’t find an updated statistic on this. So if she is an average case it will probably be February before she finds another job assuming the rate has stayed similar. It’s tough out there.
She wants to do project management work for nonprofits. In addition to her experience in disaster management and post-conflict reconstruction, she did a fellowship at UCLA and got her master’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh. She sounds like she is prepared.
Speaking of being prepared…this 28-year-old was certainly prepared when I ran across her talking on her cell phone at the top of the Metro escalators at Dupont Circle. She had a colorful umbrella next to her and opened that up just as the rain began to pick up – it had been drizzling lightly for a while.
She was quite weary of my intentions at first and asked not to be photographed – even when I offered to photograph her from far away with her face safely hidden behind the umbrella. That’s just the way it is sometimes. People are often uncomfortable being photographed, especially if it is going to be uploaded into the cavernous halls of the internet.
Originally from Kenya, Phiona is hoping to go to Africa for the holidays. When you’re unemployed there is that weird balance of time and money. When you were working you could afford to travel but didn’t have the time. Now when you are unemployed you have more time than you could imagine but spending money on travel was always difficult for me.
Anyway, I wanted to share something with you that Phiona said. We were talking about a variety of different things as the rain fell from the steel-wool colored November sky. “It’s always somebody else who tells you who you are,” she said. That’s an interesting comment because it goes along well with a phrase that I particularly like, “perception is reality.” But is it really true that we are the person that someone else tells us we are ? I say that we are who we are but we are to others what they tell us we are. Wow, somebody else could surely phrase that better than I did! By the way, I don’t think I have ever written a sentence where I used “we are” three times…perhaps I just won a prize or something!
Anyway, she didn’t know what she was going to do with the $10 when we said goodbye but promised to email me and give me an update. Well, she did just that. This week I received an email from Phiona letting me know that she bought herself some lunch with $5 of it and gave the rest to a homeless man by the Metro.
Enjoy your weekend!
Year of Giving 