Living like the Homeless

My first discovery paper was on my newfound passion for helping the homeless in and around my community. For this discovery paper, I would like to share an "experiment" I conducted since then, and any new ideas or attitudes towards the homeless I have gained.

Ever since I became passionate about helping homeless people, I have wanted to fully experience what it was like to live out on the streets. I wanted to do this so I could relate more with the homeless, and to actually know how hard it is to live with nowhere to go or anyone to see. So during spring break, I asked a friend if he would like to accompany me to live on the streets for a day or so. He agreed, and on April 4th, we set out to the great unknown. The next couple of pages will recount what events transpired while we

At about 10:30am, my friend arrived to my house. We planned what we would do during the day, and where we would go. We decided to first head towards the Target at Nordhoff and Corbin. It was about a fifteen minute walk from my house, and along the way we looked for soda cans and bottles. We had decided to recycle any cans or bottles we found during the day to pay for our meals. Looking around the trashcans outside Target and the other stores, we only found one can. Since it was so early in the morning, we realized that not too many people had finished drinking a bottle of water or can of soda. It was interesting how we instead found lots of thrown away newspapers and coffee cups.

Once we got to Target, we sat outside on the sidewalk to rest for about twenty minutes. There weren't very many people going to Target at 11am in the morning, so we decided to go to a park. The closest one I could think of was Mason Park, so we got up and walked over there, which took a good 45 minutes. On the way, we stopped by my house to grab some trash bags to toss the recyclables in.

Along the way to Mason Park from my house, we passed a couple strip malls. The stores had a couple of trashcans, so we looked for cans and bottles. This time, we found a couple water bottles, but that was it.

At the park, I realized a couple things. First of all, I never knew that there were so many trashcans at the park! They were everywhere, and the whole park had to have at least twenty-five or so. The second thing I learned was how terrible public trashcans can smell. One reeked so bad I started gagging when I looked into it. This is saying a lot, because I have a very bad sense of smell, and usually can't smell things the typical person could. This trashcan was so bad I could actually feel the warm odor inside my mouth and around my face.

The first couple of times I dug through a trashcan, it was kind of weird because people were watching. It was also a little disgusting because I had to touch things that were half-eaten, dripping, sticky and mushy. However, after the fourth trashcan or so, I was able to get used to both. I think this was partly because it hit me that I could only afford to eat if I got enough cans and bottles. One lady was cleaning up the remains of a party, and came up to me and my friend to give us a couple of empty soda cans. She also told us that the party had thrown their trash away and pointed to a nearby trashcan. So my friend and I walked over to the trashcan and found a lot of water bottles. I noticed I was beginning to get this semi-excited feeling whenever I would look into a trashcan and see some bottles or cans. Looking back, I see that my interests, concerns, priorities began to change as I spent more time outside. I forgot about homework, grades, what was on television that night, who was winning whatever basketball game, but instead thought about things like the locations of other parks, how many cans we needed to buy a decent meal, and which trashcans we haven't looked in yet.

After going through every available trashcan in the park (which took about a half hour), we ended up getting about a dozen cans and a half a bag of water bottles. We walked to a recycling center we saw across the street in a strip mall, and passed a real homeless man sitting on the sidewalk outside of a grocery store. I wanted to talk to any homeless people we ran into during our experiment, but this man seemed a little drunk because he was slouched over and was mumbling quietly to himself.

At the recycling center, we gave the worker our cans and bottles, and he gave us a look and said, "Uhh...is that it?" He dumped our bottles and cans in separate chicken-wire bowls, set them on the scale, filled out some paperwork, then handed us our money. After thirty minutes of walking and digging through trashcans, we had made a grand total of $2.20.

By this time it was about 1:30pm and either of us had eaten anything the entire day. We both had worked up an appetite walking around looking for cans in the park, so we walked down the street to a 7-11. We cheated, and bought a decent meal with some extra money my friend had brought along. Each of us had a hot dog, a soda, and we split a bag of chips. My friend also bought a candy bar. Not a very nutritious meal, but it was pretty cheap. With the food in our hands, we sat outside the doors of the 7-11 and ate. During our late lunch, we decided that we would try to not cheat anymore and only use the money we earn from recycling to buy our next meal.

Full from lunch, we walked back to my house, while wondering what to do next. We couldn't hit Mason Park again, since we probably wouldn't find too much, and there weren't any closer parks around. We decided to use my car and drive to other parks that were too far to walk to, and look for bottles and cans there. I first thought that using my car would be cheating, but my mom made the point that there are homeless people who have cars.

At 3:00pm we arrive at Northridge Park, and watch some groundhogs poke their heads out of the grassy hills (my friend's first job was to kill groundhogs in the mountains surrounding the 405 South). By this time, we were both tired from the walking and heavy lunch, so we took a nap, right there on the grass. However, during our nap my friend's boss calls and tells him last minute that he needs to work the next morning. We were originally planning to spend two full days being homeless, but the call was, in a sense, a relief. Even though I wanted to spend a long amount of time with the experiment, I was quickly dreading another day of walking through parks digging through trashcans.

After our nap, we begin looking around the park's trashcans. We soon realized that Northridge had a lot more bottles than cans. It was interesting, but I realized that people usually took water bottles to the park, not soda cans. When we were done looking inside every trashcan, we had collected a full trash bag of bottles and about twenty cans. It was about 4:30pm when we loaded my trunk with our newfound recyclables, jumped in the car, and drove towards yet another park. I knew there was a park near my old middle school, Holmes, and I also knew that it wasn't nearly as big as Northridge or Mason. But we hoped for the best.
When we arrived I noticed there were a lot of young kids playing at the park. We walked around, and didn't really find much of anything. By this time it was 5:30pm, and we realized that all of the recycling centers were probably already closed. So we drove around to the centers that we knew of and they were all closed. However, we stuck to our decision of not using any money we didn't earn through recycling, so it looked like we would be going to bed without dinner. I drove us back to my house, where we went to the bathroom and decided to visit another park, not to collect cans and bottles, but to just hang out until it was time to go to bed.

We found a small park in Porter Ranch, and decided to hang around there. My friend swung on the swings, and I rested on a nearby bench. This was when one of the biggest realizations came to me: I finally understood how boring it was being homeless. I couldn't just turn on the TV or jump on the computer. I couldn't call my friends or play video games. The homeless man I met at CSUN in my previous Discovery Paper mentioned that he wanted a portable TV or radio to pass the time, but I told him I didn't own one. When I heard him say that, I thought to myself, "Shouldn't you be spending your time looking for cans so you can eat your next meal instead of watching TV?" But now I know that you can't spend all of your time walking from park to park. It gets dark, and impossible to see into trashcans. It gets cold, and your legs get tired, and sometimes you need to just sit around and rest. But what can you do during these times? I was bored, and too tired to mess around on the kid's playground, so my only entertainment was watching my friend swing, then watch some high-schoolers race down a grassy hill on blocks of ice. At 8:15pm, we decided to go back to my house.

The plan for the night was to sleep in my friend's car, which was parked in front of my house. We got back to my house at 8:30pm, listened to the end of the Lakers, Clippers game, then decided to try to go to sleep. It was around 9pm, but I was already tired because of all the walking during the day. I slept in the front passenger seat, while my friend laid down the backseats and slept in the connecting trunk. However, a couple of hours later, my friend asked if he could take a shower, because he could still smell the trash on his arms, and couldn't fall asleep. So we went inside the house, he took a shower, and came back outside to fall asleep for the night.

The next morning we woke up at 7am, because my friend had to go to work. We decided to eat at McDonald's to, "break our fast." Afterwards, he went to work and I went home.

The whole experiment was a great experience. I know that there are friends and family who don't understand why I did what I did, but I am glad I did it. It was much harder than I first imagined it be, and couldn't even grasp the idea of waking up to go through the entire trash-digging, boring process all over again. I remember my body being sore from all the walking the day before. It makes me think about the real homeless, the ones that have to do this every single day, not because they're on Spring break, but because they need to live. And for the homeless who don't have any means of transportation, then they're only limited to whatever cans they can find in the area around them and are unable to drive around to different parks like I did. Imagine if I didn't use my car, we would have had to live off of two bucks. Yes, it's an ugly thing to dig into dirty trashcans for bottles and cans, but I think it's an even uglier thing to stand by and do nothing while the homeless do this every single day of their lives.

Even though my friend and I dug through trashcans all day, I don't think many people thought we were homeless, because we didn't look homeless. Both my friend and I wore t-shirts and basketball shorts. People didn't avoid us that much, and probably figured we were a couple of recycling geeks looking for things that didn't belong in trashcans and trying to earn some community service hours. Since our experiment, my friend and I have talked about attempting another trip, this one more daring and far stricter. We want to go somewhere there are many homeless people, like Santa Monica or downtown LA, and dress homeless. This would add an entirely new perspective, because the parks are fewer, and the "competition" is greater. Also, people would treat us the way they would treat any other homeless person. Hopefully, this plan comes to fruition, as my passion for the homeless continues to grow.