I have been serving in the parishes in Humpheys and Yazoo Counties in the Mississippi Delta since October 2010. It is now home for me. The people there are now my people. Even though it is so different from where I grew up in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago and in Orange County, California, Mississippi is my home and the place I love.
Just this week, I saw an article on the MSN website, showing that Humphreys County, where my parish in Belzoni is located, is the fifth poorest county in the entire country. In addition to that, Humphreys county had the highest rate of child poverty in all of the counties in the US, with 61% of children under 18 living in poverty, and the second lowest median household income in the US. Washington County, Mississippi, where I taught Spanish at the public high school for four years in the town of Greenville, is tied with Humphreys County in fifth place, and has had a startling increase in the poverty rate in the last couple of years. I live in this reality each day, and often times I can feel the poverty, the desperation, and the oppression of these Delta communities seething through my pores. It is a reality that seems to overwhelm me some days. Reading a statistic like this really makes it hit home on another level. Very sobering indeed.
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