I spent my hour between breakfast and lecture this morning searching for a Laundromat that would wash my hiking shoes for me along with some clothes. I tried a place to wash my clothes last week, but the load came back a bluish color, so today, I wanted to switch. A woman at the new place was so nice and she seemed unusually happy to clean my shoes. In total I paid about $4 for a load of clean stuff and sparkling clean shoes.
I then headed to Rainbow Café, a cute little hipster café for tourists here with free wifi. Our component group (Gero Research) met to go over our meeting with Ana Lydia (the owner of Casa Maria) yesterday. It was interesting to see the different perspectives we each had on her explanations for recently asking residents to leave, or the way that she judged people as having more money by the car their family came to visit them in. She also seemed skeptical of everyone as she insinuated that many more people were able to pay her than were actually letting on.
Ana Lydia’s comments reminded me about Common Hope’s ideas about how giving things away leads to people devaluing the services that are offered to them. It’s not that people necessarily don’t want to pay Casa Maria, but if they can get away with it, then it’s convenient to have one less major expense to take care of. Maybe this isn’t the case, but that’s my take on what’s going on at this place. Particularly here, where people work so hard for what seems to be very little money, they can use all the money they have access to.
We spent the afternoon explaining what we learned from Ana Lydia to our Gerontology Practice group, the OT’s that perform services at Casa Maria. We’ve all been getting attached to the residents there, so it’s alarming when they suddenly disappear with no explanation. I wonder if the residents are told where their friends went… That’s another question for the residents on Monday! Where did your buddy go?
