Giving Aid, Gaining Insight

High school sophomore Robert Quijano, balancing an armload of water bottles, warily approached a group of homeless people on Sunday under a downtown bridge strewn with trash.

Walter Grant lived there, and so did a stern matriarch in a bright blue kimono known as Miss Kitty, who kept a close eye on Robert until he brightened with a cheery “Hi there.”

That meeting set the tone for the day’s expedition to feed the homeless as part of a Loyola High School social justice program called Urban Plunge.

Sunday’s effort was conducted under the guidance of volunteers from St. Margaret Mary Church in Lomita and marked the program’s second anniversary serving Hollywood, Boyle Heights and skid row areas east of downtown.

Robert and a dozen other students handed out bottled water, sack lunches, toothpaste, dog food, underwear and socks to grateful outstretched hands less than a mile from the heart of one of the world’s most affluent cities.

“Thank the lord you guys are here!” squealed Grant, who couldn’t help regaling them with a detailed account of being shot in the left leg with a .45-caliber handgun a few weeks ago. “I’m still alive, and today because of you I’ve got a big smile across my face. See it?”

A few yards away, Miss Kitty was calling some of the youths together for a special message.

“Drugs and alcohol put us on the bottom of the heap and under this bridge; don’t follow in our footsteps,” she said. “Look at me. I’m only 40 years old but I have the heart of an 80-year-old.”

“This is real,” muttered Robert, an aspiring novelist. “It’s a firsthand story.”

The students’ first concern was helping a few of the city’s estimated 85,000 homeless. But there was another pressing mission, said Father Greg Goethals, recently named Loyola’s president.

“We aim to break these students out of their comfortable little bubbles, change the direction of their hearts and help them develop a social conscience,” Goethals said. “They’ll go on to get Ivy League educations and come back as doctors, lawyers and engineers able to give back to society in more profound ways than they would have otherwise.

“Our kids come from the wealthiest neighborhoods to the poorest,” he added. “What they learn here is that we are all one. Our differences are superficial. We are no different than the people on skid row.”

The 12 students and three teachers who accompanied them would not soon forget their encounter with some of the estimated 2,000 people believed to reside under and near the bridges and overpasses spanning the Los Angeles River.

To hear them tell it, the concrete slabs and train trestles heaped with junk, garbage and human waste are a quiet refuge from immigration authorities, police and the violence of skid row.

“It’s safer here,” said Lawrence Lorenzen, a 59-year-old Vietnam War veteran with a long white beard who transfixed the students with an impromptu lecture on misery.

“Last August, my arm was broken when I was beaten by a much younger man with a stick,” said Lorenzen, who said he lost a portion of his left ear in another fight. “Observe what’s happening around you, man. It’s life and could be your life too. But you don’t have to wind up down here.”

As he spoke, Joshua Langley, 16, was consumed with thoughts of his own father, serving with the Army in Iraq.

“It’s sad and scary to think that the government would let this happen to someone who put their life on the line for our country,” he said of Lorenzen. “I hope no Iraq war veterans I know end up like this 20 years from now.

“On the other hand, it’s opened my eyes that such people exist among us -- real people with their own stories to tell,” he added. “It makes you thankful for what you’ve got: parents, a room of my own and a good high school.”

The experience ended at a makeshift community of mostly African American veterans tucked away in the shadowy recesses under the 6th Street bridge.

The students were greeted by camp leader Tawana Jackson, 33, who said his group had settled under the bridge to escape some of skid row’s horrors -- “drugs and poverty and knifings and people’s tents set on fire, and bricks upside the head.”

“My mother did drugs, and my grandmother, so it’s in my bloodline,” he told the youths, who seemed to hang on every word.

“I’m a late bloomer,” he added matter-of-factly. “I’ve been off drugs for three days.”

Later, as the youths trooped back to their vans and vehicles, Robert reflected on what he’d seen and heard.

“It’s important for us to know what’s it’s really like out here,” he said, surveying a row of tents and sleeping bags just a few yards away from a passing freight train. “We live so close to each other, yet so far away.”