They go to school to learn a trade, work it for twenty years, then get laid off at fifty and say too bad, so sad. Anyway, he was able to go around and do some odd jobs, which kept us afloat, but they all come to a stop. And slowly we saw our lives going down the drain. We first lost our car—we just couldn’t make the payments anymore. I cried the day my car was taken. We paid on that for three years and it cost me $545 a month for three years. I had one year left to ownership. We knew then it was just a matter of time before the rug was pulled out from under us.
Just before all that I hosted a house meeting for Obama and forty-eight people showed up, including someone from the Obama campaign. I was part of the Obama campaign phone bank, making calls from home to other states like New Hampshire and Iowa for Obama in the primaries, since I have a fixed-price per month national calling plan with my phone.
I started my own home business when we first moved here to Florida; I make homemade soap from goat’s milk. I use to go to craft shows, but since the layoff I just don’t have the money to do it and I had high hopes for that business; that was my American dream. But like all dreams, you have to start off small and work your way up. I made soap everyday. I collected natural rainwater from my yard in barrels. I went to a local farm and bought my goat’s milk. I grew a lot of my own herbs. I bought a table and tent and took my soaps on the road. I did pretty good and I wanted to turn my tent into a barn-like setting and get little milk cans to place my soap in them. But here I sit with box after box of soap—hard work put into it and it all come to a stop.
So I took out some of my soaps and put new labels on them to raise some money for the campaign at my house meeting. Everyone bought, even the guy from the Obama campaign bought six of them to send to his family. He said Obama would love what I did with those.
