A Lesson in Life on the Street : Students’ Experience With the Homeless Starts from the Ground Up

The mean streets of Pasadena just got meaner for Stanford University freshman Hanh Bui.

It’s Day One on spring break with the homeless. In a weeklong program that ends Friday, 13 Stanford students are eating, sleeping and mingling at Pasadena’s Union Station shelter. They spend days walking the streets with no money, watches or maps, and lug around their belongings in a plastic trash sack.

Their lessons in street smarts are quick and to the point. Bui’s outlook changes in the time it takes a panhandler to rattle a cup.

Trash bins become potential freebie mines. Grocery carts are there for the taking. With storms predicted, the umbrella over a hot-dog vendor’s stand starts to seem tantalizingly sturdy for rain protection--and so do the big patio umbrellas in the back yards of stately houses near the Arroyo.

“One thing I learned on the street is it wouldn’t take me long to start taking things and doing things I wouldn’t normally do,” said Bui, 19, exhausted from a day of walking in Pasadena and hauling her possessions. “You’re constantly being resourceful.”

While thousands of college students spend spring break in Palm Springs or Fort Lauderdale, Fla., others hook up with social service agencies nationwide for projects to meet homeless people in Pasadena, work with migrant farm workers in Oregon or live on a Navajo reservation in Utah.

Along with Stanford, at least three area universities--UCLA, USC and Occidental College--send students on the alternative spring break projects, said H. Michael Magevney, a co-director of Break Away, a national, nonprofit clearinghouse. The 2-year-old group, based at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, gives advice to universities and students who plan spring break service trips.

Occidental College senior John Theodore, an Eagle Rock resident, planned spring break service projects for 27 students at his university as an independent study project in lieu of a term paper.

“Most of the students at Occidental are privileged, I’d say,” said Theodore, 21. “This is their chance to give something back.”

About 8,000 students nationwide join alternative spring break trips, Magevney said. Students receive no university credit and must pay a small participation fee, usually $40 to $75 for van transportation and some meals. Lodging usually is provided by the participating agency.

Magevney conceded that cynics might see the students in the spring break programs as slumming, their involvement as patronizing rather than educational.

A week’s experience isn’t going to prompt social change, but the program is intended to be a jumping-off point for students who are too busy with academics to volunteer during the regular school year, he said. “Students realize that the weeklong experience is going to last a lot longer than a suntan or a hangover that their friends in Palm Springs get,” Magevney said.

Magevney said he thinks that Union Station is the only Los Angeles County social service agency that accepts spring break groups. The homeless shelter is in its third year of hosting college students.

This year’s program includes meetings with experts on homelessness, visits to Los Angeles’ Skid Row and Santa Monica’s shelters, and assigned tasks such as cleaning shelter showers and ladling soup in food lines.

“It’s an immersion into what it means to be homeless,” said Frank Clark, Union Station’s director of volunteer programs. “The business of sleeping in the shelter will introduce them to people in that shelter. It will become Peter, Paul, Mary and their 3-year-old boy. The real faces of poverty. They’ll get to know them.”

Clark emphasized that neither beds nor food are taken away from the homeless for the program; students bring sleeping bags and sleep in a shelter annex, and food donors are asked to bring extra provisions for the week.

On a sunny, smoggy morning, the students get a crash course on Pasadena’s homeless situation, scribbling facts in red binders such as the city’s homeless count: 1,017 in 1992. Students also are asked why they are there.

Stanford sophomore Liz Casals says she wanted a firsthand look at homelessness.

“You don’t go into it thinking you can make an impact or change the world, but just, ‘I want to know,’ ” the 19-year-old American studies major said.

Psychology major Jonathan Marshall says he wanted to get inside the heads of homeless people.

“What is it that keeps them going on and not (becoming) suicidal?” the 23-year-old junior said.

In the afternoon, after lunching on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in Pasadena City Hall’s courtyard, Clark assigns groups of three to seek out an expert on a topic such as homelessness and AIDS. They have no watches and only $3 to buy rain gear, in anticipation of storms during the week. They are lucky; last year’s students got no money for rain gear, and a few resorted to panhandling. (Shelter officials discourage this.)

“You feel what it’s like to feel outcast and awkward,” said Kul Takanao Wadhwa, a junior who joined last year’s trip and is a group leader this year. “You feel separated from the rest of society.”

Clark tells the students, who had no maps or directions, to meet at Union Station shelter at 6 p.m.

“How do we know where we’re going?” Marshall asked. “How many miles to Union Station?”

But Clark doesn’t answer and walks away at 2:30 p.m. with a jaunty wave.

Freshman Mary Pbad slings her bulging trash bag over a shoulder like Santa Claus and stumbles under the weight of her belongings, about 15 pounds of clothes, towels and a sleeping bag.

“I’m giving away most of my stuff,” said Pbad, 18. Pbad sets off for City Hall, with fellow freshmen Solveig Pederson, 19, and Dai Pham, 19. All three women are wearing T-shirts, shorts and tennis shoes.

At City Hall, they learn that Mayor Rick Cole is out and City Manager Philip A. Hawkey is in a meeting. The city manager’s secretary, Lillian Rogers, writes down the name of city Housing Administrator Phyllis Mueller on a yellow sticky note and gives them a map to her office on Raymond Avenue.

Pbad huffs down City Hall’s steps.

“Why don’t we get shopping carts?” she suggested.

The three walk a few blocks, study the map, set their bags down, and walk a few more blocks. Pham shifts her bag from over her shoulder to her front, cradling it like a baby. No one gives them a second glance.

Pbad stops in her tracks in front of Swan Cleaners on Colorado Boulevard and darts inside. She skips out triumphantly, waving a roll of plastic garment bags--makeshift rain gear.

The students find the city’s housing office and spend half an hour with Mueller, shooting questions at her on subsidized housing, welfare recipients and public attitudes toward the homeless.

With one task under their belts, the students move on in search of more rain gear and make their way to Thrifty Drug Store at Colorado Boulevard and Marengo Avenue. Pham points out a sign at the entrance: “All packages and bags are to be checked with the clerk.”

Pbad decides to watch their bags and gratefully sinks down to rest while the other two buy a 30-count box of 10-gallon lawn and trash bags for $1.83. Outside, Pbad still is talking about trying to nab shopping carts when a man with a shopping cart trundles by and then plops down on a bus stop bench.

The three students stop trying trash bags and garment bags on for size and watch him silently. He is in his 30s, with wild eyes and hair, and wears a worn Hard Rock Cafe jacket, mismatched socks and white sweat pants that stop mid-calf. His shopping cart is full of old blankets and wrinkled clothes.

The man gets up, checks the change holder at a pay telephone, picks up stubbed-out cigarette butts from the ground and shoves them in his pocket, and sits down again. He is wearing headphones and holding a portable cassette player. His expression is troubled.

Pham whispers to her partners, “Should I talk to him?”

They urge her on, and she tentatively sits next to him.

He doesn’t look at her. His portable player is in his lap, and he is fiddling with the disjointed spiral loop of a notebook and a plastic heart charm. He mumbles that he is making a bracelet and then shakes his head at her.

“I don’t feel like talking,” he tells her.

The students move on, passing a taupe Mercedes 580 SL convertible parked in a loading-only zone. Pham is quiet, saying only that she felt funny talking to the man.

The sun is beginning to sink in the horizon, and the three decide to head toward Union Station. On the way, they run into two groups of their peers--each with shopping carts. At Union Station, Pbad heads through the main gates to see who else is around while the others wait outside. She passes a woman in her 20s with long, straight hair who is sitting on the sidewalk with two male friends.

“Are you guys here to serve the meal?” the woman asked.

Pbad explains that she is visiting from Stanford.

“You’re staying here?” the woman asked in disbelief. “Are you crazy?”

One of her male friends laughs as Pbad disappears instead.

“No beds,” he calls after her in mock warning.

The long-haired woman shakes her head and ventures a guess on what the Stanford students want.

“The side show,” she said wearily.