Trip a Turning Point for Glendale Teens : Youth: Filled with compassion after confronting poverty in a Mexican village, students plan a book about their journey.

Even now, almost a year after she traveled to Mexico to bring food and clothes to a starving Indian village where children were dying, 17-year-old Monica Herrada divides her life into two categories, pre-trip and post-trip.

The pre-trip Monica was uninvolved, uninspired and “selfish, I guess.” The post-trip Monica became president of her high school’s Latino students club and wants to join an international volunteer organization someone told her about. “It’s called the Peace Corps,” she said. “Have you heard of it?”

Gazing at the world through the scratched, weary lenses of adulthood, it is easy to forget what it feels like to be young and to see, do or hear something that suddenly, with a fantastic burst of clarity, transforms the way you look at the world and your place in it. Sometimes, if we are lucky, we can look back and recognize the epiphanies that changed us.

For Monica and seven Hoover High School classmates, a 10-day journey to the harsh high desert of the dwindling Tarahumara tribe last Easter may prove to be such a pivotal event. Energized by their experiences among the Tarahumara and bursting to share them, they are raising money to publish a book about their adventure.

Theirs is a coming-of-age parable. The trip to Samachique was not postcard-perfect. There were setbacks along the way that left the students more cynical, but also more confident in their own abilities.

The students are not so naive as to think that their slim, 56-page volume, entitled “Discovery of Destitution,” will save either the Tarahumara or the homeless people in Hollywood they interviewed to round out the project. Their aim is actually far more subversive.

They want to prove that teenagers possess a deep capacity for change and compassion, given the chance and the right tools.

“I’m hoping that people get a better perspective on what high school students can do as opposed to what they are expected to do,” said Stephen Sotomayor, 17, a Hoover senior who did not go on the trip but agreed to oversee fund-raising for the $3,000 book project.

The stories the Glendale teenagers tell of the proud, suffering people they encountered in the Sierra Madre make it easy to see why the trip so affected them.

An old tribes woman asked if Monica would take a frightened little girl the woman could no longer afford to feed back to California. A young boy, meanwhile, gave Jennifer Fors, 17, a new perspective on the physical comforts she took for granted. Shoeless, wearing only a T-shirt and torn jeans, he tried to warm himself by a dead fire as Jennifer stood nearby, miserably cold though bundled in two pairs of socks, two shirts, a sweater and jacket.

Armen Sarajian, 18, a Hoover senior who was battling depression at the time of the trip, drew spiritual renewal and a “much-needed sense of worth” from a village leader who invited him to beat the ritual drums in a holy Easter ceremony.

“I think it’s pretty ironic that some kid from Glendale, California, who has never known much more than his own world could find the meaning of his life in some remote village,” Armen wrote in his contribution to the book.

The odyssey began in the art appreciation class taught by Pierre Odier, chairman of Hoover’s fine arts department. A bearded iconoclast who has worked at Hoover High for 30 years, Odier tries to stimulate the consciences and interests of his students by exposing them to cultures and conditions different from their own. He challenges the teenagers to come up with projects to help and has journeyed with his students to West Africa and the Arctic.

“They have been pretty well put into tunnel vision, which creates opinions and stereotypes that are not productive for mankind at large,” Odier said of his students.

In January 1995, Odier brought his art appreciation students photographs and news articles depicting the plight of the Tarahumara, the indigenous tribe that ekes out a subsistence by hunting and gathering in the rough mountains of Chihuahua state in northern Mexico. A severe drought threatened the dwindling tribe with mass starvation. Babies were dying of malnutrition.

Before long, the students had organized collection drives to pay for the $9,000 trip and secure the clothes, food, medicine, toys, farming tools and school supplies they hoped to bring to Mexico. Other students scoffed at their requests for donations and “insisted that our project would be a failure,” said Gabriela Gonzalez, 17.

But by the first day of spring break four months later, they had a truck packed with four tons of donated goods ready to head to the border. More obstacles soon presented themselves, each one providing yet another lesson about a severe world.

Although the group had contacted border authorities in advance to pave the way for a smooth crossing, Mexican officials impounded the truck when they got to Ciudad Juarez, opposite the Texas border, and accused the students of planning to sell their load in Mexico.

Odier was deliberately vague about how they finally managed to get the goods across--it involved hiring a second truck with a Mexican driver--but said the group decided early on to reach their destination no matter what they encountered along the way.

The Hoover students were also unprepared for the official corruption and class conflict they saw in Mexico. Before leaving California, they had written to a priest running a mission near the Indian village who had promised to help distribute the goods. But when they met with him, the priest insisted that they give him money instead because he had already collected contributions to buy food for the Tarahumara. The students said they would distribute the goods themselves.

Later, they asked the Indians about him and “they were like, ‘What father, what food?’ ” Monica said. “I got a real taste of injustice upfront.”

In the village of Samachique, the group set up a distribution center in an abandoned jail. As word spread of the strangers bearing food, people came from miles around. A small diplomatic crisis erupted when Mexican loggers who worked nearby lined up for a handout and pushed the Indians to the back. The students went directly to the back of the line to make sure the items reached the people most in need, but their supply ran out long before they filled all the outstretched hands.

Crushed, the students gave their own possessions away. Monica pulled the Nikes off her feet. Karen Park gave her baseball cap to a little boy.

In his essay, Armen recalls staying up with a village elder the night of the distribution and apologizing for what he perceived as the group’s failure to ease the suffering.

“He actually comforted me and told me everything would be all right because God had said so,” the student wrote. “Somehow I believed that he knew God, and he would do just as the elder said he would.”

Once the students returned and decided to publish their book, they sent out a second team to interview and photograph homeless people in Hollywood for a comparative study. Several students who conducted those interviews said that, like their classmates who went to Mexico, they found venturing into an unknown realm of society eye-opening.

“They are so much different than we think they are. We think of them as being ignorant. But we talked to these three bums and they were incredibly intelligent,” said Angela Forss, 17. “They knew what was going on in government and they had opinions about it. They kept telling us to read, read, read.”

The interviews were a mixed bag. One person spat at them, and more than a few swore at them. A Vietnam veteran endured their questions after they agreed to give him money.

But one woman they approached, sensing their awkwardness, impressed them with her wit and grace. “I know I’m on the street, so don’t be afraid to ask me about it,” she told Colleen Khachatourians, 17. But when the girl asked to take her picture, the woman refused.

“I’m not looking pretty today,” she said.

Like the Mexico sojourners, Colleen found that people outside Odier’s class viewed the homeless study skeptically or with derision. Some friends told her she was wasting her time, that people living on the streets deserved to be there.

“My parents were like, ‘Can’t anyone else do it? Why do kids have to do it?’ ” she said. “I told them it is something I have to do and it is positive.”

Monica is grateful for the chance to work on the book, which the students plan to sell for $10. It helps keep her memories--the good and the bad--from Samachique alive.

She still thinks about the little girl she could not bring back to California with her and what happened to her. She thinks about the corrupt priest. She wonders who might be wearing her Nikes.

She does not know how long the memories will stay vivid or how they will shape her life. But she tries to make a difference in little ways, such as becoming president of the Latinos Unidos club and volunteering in a catechism class at her church. She has earned her grown-up lenses, but they are not scratched--yet.

“You become so cynical after something like this. I seem to notice the bad things about how things are run at school, or in the community, things I didn’t see before,” Monica said. “Now that I see them, I feel like I have to do something about them.”