Bus of Knowledge

by By Ace Tafoya/PoorNewsNetwork Community Journalist

Maria Velmoral, a single mother of two looks nervously and excitedly down the corner of a busy San Francisco street. She, along with about 42 other people, mostly from the East Coast are on the Kensington Welfare Rights Union ‘2002 New Freedom Bus Tour’ A Economic Human Rights For All! Campaign. Just getting in from Salt Lake City, Utah at 6.00 in the morning, Maria walks up the stairs of POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights) to have breakfast with her comrades. "I believe everybody’s entitled to health care and a safe place to live and affordable, she explained to me while having coffee. Maria whose always worked all her life and has never been on welfare is thrilled about the bus tour, but warns, "I can go home right now, and not have a home."

The 2002 New Freedom Bus Tour kicked off in Philadelphia, PA on November 10, 2000 and will tour 25 different cities that have high amounts of poverty and homelessness, meeting up along the way with several other community based organizations such as Womens’ Economic Agenda Project (WEAP), POOR Magazine, and POWER And according to the press release…The tour is traversing the nation, calling for Economic Human Rights for all; including the rights to housing, food, clothing, education, and with a special emphasis on the Right to Health Care.

Galen Tyler, Lead Organizer of the bus tour is jazzed about opening peoples minds about poverty, homelessness, health issues and other concerns dealing with poor folks. "(The tour) is linking up with different members of the Poor Peoples Economic Human Rights Campaign throughout the country to document these economic human rights violations," he said to me as a sudden whisk of the Bay Area air sent a chill throughout his body. "The recent downsizing of hundreds of thousands of jobs throughout the country and the increasing amount of people who are going without adequate healthcare as well as having any type of healthcare and to link with different groups to try and build on this movement to end poverty."

Earlier this month, San Francisco voters passed Proposition N or the Care Not Cash initiative. This allows the city to cut GA payments of roughly $390 a month to $59 a month. This is a racist law which will go into effect July 1, 2003. Quite frankly, we needed a bus like the New Freedom Bus to help spread our message of the hatred and lies the proposition conjured up.

"We have a voice and it’s going to be heard, and we’re trying to tell people to come out and support us and support themselves, because they need to know their human rights and take charge!" Mrs. Morales another passenger on the tour bus told me. "We need to awaken the people that are homeless, those who have health issues, those that are jobless, those that are working poor to come out and speak up for themselves. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem."

Before going off to Oakland to protest the closing of a pain clinic at Summit Hospital with WEAP, Reo English a resident of Philadelphia and bus tour member explained to me, "It’s like a reality tour, because of a lot of people are in my situation of being homeless." She wants to see an end to all this capitalism and classism and just get what’s equally hers and others of need.

This New Freedom Bus tour now in it’s 2nd year travelling the country, consisting of nearly one hundred organizations of poor and homeless families, working and unemployed families, are all struggling to build a movement to end poverty, is good work. These people of all ages are doing important work and somehow I wished I was on the bus tour with them. It’s too bad they couldn’t pick up eager people like myself along their journey. Good luck to them and I hope they return soon. The bus tour ends in New York City on December 10 – just in time for Human Rights Day.