This article was posted in Spanish on Thursday July 12th by the BBC Mundo organization, regarding the city of Fort Smith. As a service to readers, we have translated the article into English. The original article can be found by clicking here
How is life in Fort Smith, “the most unhappy city” in the United States
“This is not about people having difficulty getting food, it’s just that they do not eat.”
He says it and then a nervous laugh. Charolette Tidwell is a 72-year-old retired nurse who for half a decade has spent half of her pension buying food to distribute it to 1,200 adults and hungry children in Fort Smith, Arkansas.
“I realized that problem when a grocer told me at a local supermarket the story of a couple who bought cat food to replace proteins in their diet,” Tidwell tells me.
6 indicators in which the United States is at the level of the underdeveloped countries
But hunger alone is a symptom of a major crisis.
The Gallup pollster measured the well-being and quality of life for 189 years in 189 US locations and published a survey of the results in March of this year. Fort Smith ranked last.
For that reason, several media, including Business Insider and Yahoo Finance, cataloged it as “the most unhappy city” in the United States.
“The survey measures five factors: life purpose, financial security, physical health, community life and socialization, and in those aspects, Fort Smith registered a very low rating,” Gallup senior analyst Dan Witters told BBC News.
“What we saw is that it is a cycle that they can not break: they do not have money to buy food, so they feed poorly, then they get sick because of it, and all indicators of well-being are affected,” he added.
At Fort Smith, however, they do not seem to know much about the survey that gives them the infamous title.
In the midst of what used to be the barracks at Fort Shafee’s military base - “where Elvis Presley lent part of his military service”, they boast - the sun falls heavily on a boisterous group enjoying a craft beer festival.
The event is a joint idea of several local businessmen to raise funds and donate them to a foundation that works with people living in poverty.
Among them, dressed in blue shorts and green shirt, is the Reverend Jim Horme, with a small glass of beer in his hand.
“If you ask me, a person like me, with a good income, is happy at Fort Smith, but if you ask the Hispanics, the blacks, the Asians, those who earn the minimum wage, they do not, they do not they are having a good time, “Horme explains to BBC Mundo
This last point is key: one in four children in Fort Smith has suffered from hunger in the past 30 days, according to the Arkansas Department of Health. And at least 35% of the people interviewed by Gallup in the city said they do not have enough money to buy food. That’s where Nurse Tidwell and her Anthioc for Youth and Family foundation take action. After spending the morning sorting food with a couple of volunteers, Tidwell loads a truck with 172 bags of groceries and drives it to the delivery site this week: the Nelson Homes residential complex, for retired people who can not pay a lease.
In the basement, where the communal dining room is, Marcus Wright waits in a line for Tidwell to hand him his bag, held only by a walker that helps him move. “Without this market, it would be very difficult for me to eat.”
For nearly five decades, Wright held two jobs: trucker and substitute teacher. And in all those years he managed to save a little more than US $ 100,000 for his retirement. But during the financial crisis of 2008 that money vanished. And it was left with a monthly help from the state government of US $ 1,000.
“I pay 300 dollars of rent and the rest of what I receive from the government is barely enough to pay for medical visits and the remedies,” the man tells me, who has a chronic condition in his ankles that affects his stability. Invoices can reach, in a few months, 800 dollars. Then Wright does not eat, unless he is assisted. And this happens in a country that wastes - that is, throws away - 36 million tons of food a year, according to a study by the University of Arkansas.
In the case of children, the situation is similar. So, after leaving the bags to the elderly, Tidwell drives his truck to Spradling Elementary School. With her platinum and luxuriant hair, Robyn Dawson, the rector of the school, walks around the premises greeting her pupils. Of the 800 students that have this elementary school, 98% qualify to receive a food subsidy because their families do not earn enough to put the bread on the table every day. “We provide them with two meals a day, and we have the lowest absence rate in the entire city, because the children know that if they do not come, they do not eat,” says Dawson.
The problem, she adds, is that they have to be open all year, even in summer (from June to August), because when they close - on weekends, for example - there are children who go hungry. “What quality of life can someone have in those conditions?” He asks. “What child can be happy like that?”
The Whirlpool era
It’s Saturday afternoon and the streets of downtown Fort Smith are empty. And many commercial premises, abandoned, accumulate dust and overdue bills. The first impression left by this sector of the city is not that it is an unhappy place, but that it is paralyzed. Stagnant.
Enaí López endures the inclement sun of midday on the main street, dressed in a cloth suit that feels uncomfortable for these temperatures. He is Salvadoran and arrived eight years ago from Portland, Oregon. He was persuaded by the photo sent to him by a relative who had a refrigerator full of fish that he himself had fished in the river that surrounds Fort Smith.
But as soon as he entered the city, the illusion of abundance vanished.
“Whenever I arrive at a site I can see its progress in the number of constructions, and the first month I was here I did not see a single one”. “Afterwards I concluded that the stagnation of this place had to do with its conservatism: they did not have a single new building, but they had made a national monument where the gallows with which dozens of people were executed in the 19th century is placed”, He adds .
A historical and geographical conservatism: Fort Smith is at the heart of what is known as the “biblical belt”, a sector that encompasses 12 southern states. where religion is almost as important as water. This, in part, has meant that the proposals for economic renewal - based on a social and financial opening, such as the installation of the central offices of companies such as FedEx and Walmart - have not penetrated here. Fort Smith is on the canvas and has trouble getting up.
What they do have clear its inhabitants is who caused them such a knockout: Whirlpool.
“In 2006, the Whirlpool plant, which produced refrigerators and washing machines, shut down and left 5,000 people on the street, which was a blow that the city never recovered from,” explains Talicia Richardson, spokesperson for the Fort Smith Employers Association.
And as if that would not have been enough, two years later the great financial crisis arrived. As of 2008, the indicators deteriorated until reaching numbers in red. An example: 48% of the inhabitants do not have enough money to buy a house (12% more than the national average figure), which affects above all the sociability and sense of community.
“To gain access to a two-room apartment in Fort Smith, one would have to earn $ 30 an hour, the minimum salary is $ 8.2,” explains Richardson.
But the worst records are those of health. According to the state health department, 18% of adults have been diagnosed with diabetes, an index that is not only the highest in the state of Arkansas, but twice the national average.
But the worst records are those of health. According to the state health department, 18% of adults have been diagnosed with diabetes, an index that is not only the highest in the state of Arkansas, but twice the national average.
Not counting smoking: 39% of the deaths of men in the county are due to diseases associated with cigarette smoking.
“People who do not have health insurance have to pay hospital bills, and for those who have insurance, they lose money on medications,” says Hilda King, the manager of Nelson Homes. “If they took away at least half of those expenses, people would live quieter, happier.”
The best on the planet
But not everyone believes that things are so bad. Nayra Camacho confesses that she never thought she would be so hard to leave Fort Smith.
“When I had to leave because I got married, it caused an anxiety crisis that ended in depression,” he tells me. “I missed this city a lot, I think it’s a great place to live.”
Camacho was not born in Fort Smith, but in Mexico. Her parents crossed the border when she was 3 years old and has never returned. For two decades he lived as an undocumented immigrant, until in 2016 the then President Barack Obama approved the law known as DACA, which temporarily legalized the situation of those without papers that had been brought to the country as children.
“My parents chose Fort Smith because it was a quieter place,” he explains. He had a childhood without many problems, but his life was complicated when he wanted to enter the university. “My parents could only pay two semesters, and as an undocumented woman, I could not access the scholarships.”
Then something happened that made him consider this city to be the best on the planet: a group of neighbors got together and paid him the rest of the tuition so that he could graduate as a psychologist.
“Fort Smith has those things and it has a lot of potential to be the most appetizing corner of Arkansas: we are next to a river, we have a beautiful landscape, we can improve,” he insists enthusiastically.
Face Wash
On the way to the river, the facades of some houses and warehouses look like huge canvases full of colorful drawings, of cowboys riding on portentous steeds or weasels that scurry through the windows of the buildings. Many of these murals are part of a local project to attract tourists known as Unexpected, in which international street artists intervene the walls of some buildings without people knowing where the next graffiti will appear.
A face wash for a downcast city.
It is an initiative of the private company in conjunction with the mayor of Fort Smith, in whose office they accept without problems the problems that the city has. But they are not very happy with the qualification of “the most unhappy”.
“More than saying that we are the most unhappy city, we are a city where we have not taken advantage of the opportunities,” says Carl Geffken, the local government spokesman. Geffken is tremendously tall, dressed in a linen shirt, dumbbells and a pink bow tie that adorns his neck. He is from New York and lived the resurgence of the metropolis after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
That is why, he says, although Fort Smith is one of the cities with the lowest per capita income in the country (US $ 40,970, below the national average), the problem that afflicts it is “cultural and mentality, not money” .
“We have not been able to recover from the crisis of the Whirlpool factory and the financial crash of 2008 and we have to do something urgent, because we have already wasted 10 years that other cities have taken advantage of,” he says. “Our budget is limited, we do not have social plans for food or housing, because we have to dedicate our resources to other basic expenses: security, infrastructure and administration.”
He trusts that private initiatives combined with the operational capacity of the mayor’s office can move the city forward. Others think that you have to do things differently: think creatively, suggest, think outside the box.
Dance to win
When Brad Randall, the owner of a used car dealership that carries three generations of his family, read on the Internet that Fort Smith was being called the “most miserable” city in the United States, he decided something had to be done.
And the best thing that occurred to him was dancing.
It’s Sunday. On the esplanade next to the river a group of people rehearse a choreography to the rhythm of the catchy “Uptown Funk” of Bruno Mars.
Randall has called them to beat the Guinness record of the greatest number of street dancers. The only condition imposed by the company that publishes the popular Guinness book is that to break the brand, and that is recorded in the 2019 edition, they must perform a choreography that lasts at least five minutes.
“This is an initiative to tell the world that we are not what comes out in the media, we are changing that image of our city, we are demonstrating that we can be happy,” explains Randall.
The group raises their hands when the rehearsal director gives the instruction through the microphone. The problem begins when you have to move your legs, but the general lack of coordination ends in laughter. “We are sure that we will get it, we have more than 600 registered and we will put the name of Fort Smith on the map,” adds Randall.
After three rehearsals, on May 29 the registrants were summoned on Garrison Avenue, the main one in the city. The previous record had been set in New York in 2015, with 252 people dancing in front of the headquarters of the NBC network. So to break the record Fort Smith needed 253 people.
But that day only 187 arrived.
