They’ll Be Hungry for a Learning Experience

They’re fine with the idea of sleeping in a car. They can deal with panhandling for lunch money, passing up a dinner and not talking to friends for a few days. No television? No problem.

But please, please, don’t take away their daily shower and shampoo.

All wailing and pleading aside--and there was a lot of it Tuesday--125 students at Irvine High School have agreed to deprive themselves of a host of creature comforts to get a sense of what it might be like to be homeless.

Officials at HomeAid America, a Costa Mesa-based organization that builds shelters for temporarily homeless Orange County families, dreamed up the exercise as part of an awareness project for National Hunger and Homelessness Week.

Starting this morning, students will tote a toothbrush, hairbrush and deodorant with them at all times--the three regular companions of many homeless people. They will attend lectures on homelessness and visit shelters in addition to attending their regular classes.

The project ends Friday morning. Next week, they will share their experiences at a school assembly.

No one involved in creating the project is pretending that this exercise will give the teenagers more than a tiny taste of what homeless people endure.

The students will panhandle for food only once--and even then, by asking friends in the cafeteria lunch line for spare change. As Junior Kevin Potts put it Tuesday: “I already do that all the time.”

Plans to sleep in a public park fell through--too many public agencies to negotiate with--and so instead on Thursday night students are asked to bed down in the family car parked in the driveway, or sleep on the floor or in the backyard. They’re supposed to stay away from their pals, mimicking the isolation of many people on the streets. Cell phones and e-mail are absolute no-nos.

But they will have to suffer through one hardship unimaginable to many a teen--no showers until Thursday morning. Going to school with greasy hair? How will they do it?

“Can’t we take just a minute-long shower, just stay in there for a second?” pleaded one boy Tuesday as the rules of the exercise were explained.

The teenagers each had different reasons for agreeing to such self-inflicted punishments.

Shaista Vally, a 16-year-old junior whose family fled South Africa when she was 6, said she hopes the exercise will build compassion among her classmates.

“I just feel that many kids don’t care,” she said. “I want them to stop living in this closed world . . . where things don’t directly affect them.”

Kevin, the junior who claims to routinely ask friends for lunch money, said he is participating because he hopes it will change his own attitude about the homeless.

“When I look at a homeless person, I think I kind of look down on them,” Kevin said. Already, that view is changing, he said.

Many students said they were surprised when Michael Lennon, chief executive officer of HomeAid America, told them that the homeless are not primarily the substance abusers and the mentally ill who are seen talking to themselves as they push shopping carts or beg at freeway offramps. In Orange County, many of the estimated 20,000 homeless people are men and women with children, who struggle to hold down jobs and periodically slip through the cracks, out of their apartments and into the streets.

Several students were shocked Tuesday when one of their own classmates revealed a secret: she had been homeless for a time.

After hearing the rules, students were each given a profile of an actual homeless person, and told that some of those people would come to the school-wide assembly next week to tell their stories. Throughout the week, students are supposed to imagine being in this person’s shoes.

“Yes!” exclaimed junior Crystal Davis as she received her profile. “I’m sober.” But reading her alter ego’s history, Crystal soon realized she had other problems: She’s 29, with a tiny income and five children, ages 2 to 14.

“You don’t have to be guilty about living in Irvine,” HomeAid America’s Lennon told the students. “But if you have stuff that most of the world doesn’t have, do you have a responsibility?”

Lennon believes the answer is yes. And he hopes that as the week goes by, students will stop grumbling about spending 24 hours without a hot shower in a pretty pink bathroom and start thinking about how they can improve society. “They’re impressionable. They’re idealistic,” he said of the students. “Some of them may take the week’s experience and use it to find ways to make the world a better place.”

After they get that shower.