Actual Eagle Butte Post Number 1

I apologize for the last post. Andrea was being ridiculous. And now I'm talking as I type, and it's pretty weird.

So two days ago, we arrived in Eagle Butte, SD after flying through Denver and Rapid City and then driving from Rapid City to Eagle Butte. Eagle Butte is a Native American (Lakota) reservation in the center of South Dakota that is in one of the poorest counties in the nation.

We started our work Monday morning by sorting a lot of prom dresses and accessories to prepare for the Cheyenne River Youth Project's annual Passion for Fashion event on Saturday after we leave. The event give the native girls a chance to dress up nice and boost their self image. Eagle Butte doesn't have any prom dress stores, and most people don't have enough money to even afford dresses, even if they could make the trip to a bigger city which would be at least an hour drive away.

But this morning we became aware of much more dire problems in the community after talking to a counselor in this area. There were a ton of things that absolutely shocked me about the community here:
1. Something like 80-85% of kids in this community have been sexually abused. The counselor we spoke to said she hadn't talked to anyone on the reservation who hadn't been sexually abused.
2. The unemployment rate is almost as high, somewhere between 70 and 75% from what I recall. The people have no motivation to work and are seriously better off not having a job. If you have a job here, the price of rent goes up based on a percentage of your income, you don't qualify for food stamps, and you are basically worse off. The people who do find jobs often quit them quickly because they seriously can't afford to have jobs, even if they want to, because they can't spend time with family, pay rent, or feed their families.
3. Continuing off of number 2, the government has done so much harm to this community. It's insane. As I mentioned, welfare makes a job not worth having. Also, while they have "free" healthcare, everyone is afraid to use it. In the 70's the Indian Healthcare system the doctors would often sterilize their patients or blackmail them. For example, after a woman would give birth, the doctor might refuse to give the mother her baby unless she consented to being sterilized. In another case that the woman speaking to us today used, one of her relatives was incorrectly diagnosed twce before they correctly identified his leuchemia. The patient even had to travel to a doctor to fix his "kidney stones," only to discover after arriving that he didn't actually have kidney stones after the doctor told him that he had been incorrectly diagnosed.
4. Drug and alcohol abuse is RIDICULOUS. The counselor told us how she got drunk for the first time when she was 11, and some of the kids here smoke pot as early as 7 years old. It's terrible.
5. Gang violence is terrible as well. Most people join gangs because they need a sense of belonging and a family, and usually don't get that at home. Almost half of the kids on the reservation drop out of high school, and of the ones who go to college, only 15% of them stay past their first semester. This is usually due to family pressures and not having any connections at their college compared to the families at home.

Most of what we've been doing while we've been here is playing with the kids either with board games or in the gym playing basketball. They LOVE basketball. It's super fun, but at the same time I feel like we could be doing more to help their situation, like perhaps teaching them. More updates, as well as facebook pictures are sure to come soon.