After a few days, I realised that everyone finished their stories with a fantastic parting shot full of fighting spirit:

Things are bad now but we will start again.

We will grit our teeth and work hard and gradually things will get better.

We have no choice other than to fight and we will do so.

Listen to their stories under the ’People’ link in the right-hand column on this page.

I was most surprised when we met Trina Benavides in a shopping centre outside Oklahoma City. She was sitting on a bench with an older woman and having a rest. The older woman was her mother Pam.

I asked Trina how she had survived the crisis in recent years and she replied with a story that was uncanny because it was like that of the Joad family in Steinbeck’s ’Grapes of Wrath’. Only backwards.

Tom Joad and his family were forced to leave Oklahoma during the depression in the 30s and travel to California to find work. Trina and her husband Rafael come from Oklahoma and were living a comfortable life in California. Both are college graduates. Both used to work as police officers. Then Rafael got a good job with a consultancy company responsible for cleaning hospitals. He was recruited to California in 2007.

They lived in Lancaster, north of Los Angeles, not far from Bakersfield, where Steinbeck’s novel about the Joad family ends.

Before the financial crash in 2008, Trina felt that something was wrong. They had friends in the property industry who said that business was getting worse. Something was not right. Small signs, things you couldn’t quite understand…

Then the Lehman Brothers investment bank went bankrupt in September 2008. And a global financial crisis ensued. Rafael was responsible for the cleaning at Antelope Valley Hospital and he should have been safe but everyone was cutting back and suddenly there was no job for Rafael.

He was fired in March 2009. Day after day he looked for work. He used all his contacts and visited potential employers.

Trina and Rafael have four boys, Noah, Gabe, Donovan and Dashiell, who had just been born when Rafael was fired. The family were renting a house for 1,400 dollars a month. Trina and Rafael sold their furniture. They slept on blankets on the floor and told the kids they were pretending to camp. They opened the windows so that fresh air came in and they showed the kids the stars.

When the family had 100 dollars left, Trina said:
”We have to go home again.”

Let me interject here that she tells her story in detail and without sentimentality. Several times she thanks me for taking the trouble to listen to her. She is humorous and laughs. But sometimes she starts to hiccough. This is when she holds back the tears.

She says:
”Rafael was earning over 60,000 a year.”

She says:
”We could afford everything we wanted to do.”

She says:
”I sometimes went to a manicurist just because it was nice.”

She says:
”I wasn’t as fat then. We ate well. I looked after myself and my family.”

They packed their possessions on a trailer, stuffed the kids into their minibus and began the journey home. They were like the Joad family, only in the 2010s, with their possessions on an overloaded vehicle, a family without money.

The department store giant Walmart offers a cash transfer service. The family’s route depended on where there were Walmart stores to which Trina’s mother could send money for petrol and food.

Now they are back home in Oklahoma. Rafael has found a job as a middle manager in a McDonald’s restaurant. He earns 18,000 dollars a year, which puts a family with four kids a good way below the official poverty line. Trina receives food coupons worth 876 dollars a month from the social welfare authorities.

I have the feeling that the hardest thing for her is the humiliation. She says that the poor are prejudged – as stupid, uneducated, slovenly, perhaps abusers.

She is humiliated but she still has her pride.

”We didn’t give up. Many couples can’t take the stress and separate. But we stayed together. We have each other. I try to be happy. I try to think beyond my situation.”

Then she says:
”We have to keep moving forward. There is no point in grumbling.”

Everyone I spoke to said roughly the same thing. That they are relying on their own wits. That they are trying to be positive. That they are tightening their belts and working and ultimately better times must come. I heard no one demanding help.

It is incredibly impressive. But everyone talks about their individual place in society, that only they themselves are responsible.
With only individual fighting spirit, there will be a thousand Rafaels competing for the job as middle manager at McDonald’s.

Imagine if all these strong people made demands together. What a movement it could be!

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