August 8, 2009
‘A wonderful revelation’
Jesuit High School students moved by experience of living with homeless
By Denise MacLachlan
Herald staff
Jesuit High School theology teachers Katie Maynard, center left, and Charlene Cardenas accompany students participating in the immersion program at Loaves & Fishes. Their principal mode of transportation was walking. Photos courtesy of Katie Maynard
In a theology class at Jesuit High School in Carmichael last May, a student comments that churches are “where the poor go to get stuff and the rich go to dump stuff.” He argues that if the church lets itself be just a charitable organization, then it won’t make any real change in the world.
Another student adds, “Jesus told us to love our neighbor,” which is a lot more personal than “donate to our neighbor.” A lively discussion ensues around what it means to “feed the hungry.”
The class is part of a series conducted by Katie Maynard, chair of the school’s theology department, to prepare a group of eight juniors and one senior for the school’s immersion program, during which students live with the poor for a week.
Groups of Jesuit High School students have lived with the poor in Mexico and the United States. They have experienced living in poverty in Appalachia, New Orleans, La., on a Native American reservation in South Dakota, in the Tenderloin district in San Francisco, and in downtown Sacramento.
The immersion takes place in the context of the students’ focus on social justice during their junior year of theology, Maynard told The Herald.
If the students have direct contact with the poor, they’ll experience the poor as people like themselves, Maynard said. That experience of shared humanity transforms everything, she contended. It changes how the students see themselves, how they see the world and how they understand poverty itself.
Maynard’s students, accompanied by Maynard and by Charlene Cardenas, also a theology teacher at Jesuit, spent their immersion week of May 31 to June 5 at Loaves & Fishes in downtown Sacramento.
Garren Bratcher, co-director of the charitable organization for the homeless and director of the immersion program at Loaves & Fishes for the last eight years, arranged a series of activities over the week to give students an experience close to being homeless, he said in an interview.
When students arrive on a Sunday night he discusses safety with them — students are always accompanied by Bratcher and by their chaperones — and lets them sleep outdoors in locked Friendship Park, the green space at the charity where homeless people can hang out during the day without being arrested for loitering. The park grass is the softest place the students will sleep all week.
On Monday morning, Bratcher wakes the students early, takes away all of their belongings except for their sleeping bags, and deposits them outside the locked gates of the Loaves & Fishes compound. Friendship Park opens at 7 a.m. and closes at 2:30 p.m.
The students first have to figure out how services work at Loaves & Fishes, so they can get a meal and some toiletry items and maybe a plastic bag to carry their belongings. Then they must find someplace that will give them dinner that night.
On Monday night, the Jesuit students end up at the Union Gospel Mission in Sacramento, where they were required to listen to an hour-long sermon before being given a meal.
Other required activities for the students include discovering the location of county general assistance offices and making their way there by walking or by using public transportation when they have tickets.
Senior Pat Carden said that having to walk everywhere was a lot more tiring than he’d expected. So was finding restrooms and places to rest in between looking for meals, he added. Another student was taken to the back of a downtown drugstore for questioning — his loitering was suspicious.
Junior Justin Lobo observed that he hadn’t expected the lives of the homeless to be so hard or so busy. “We had to run from one end of town to the other just to get meals,” he noted.
Junior Alex Intaglia in an e-mail that homelessness centers around the daily quest for shelter, the necessity of finding food every night, and the loneliness of wandering or waiting around every day.
The Jesuit students also traveled to “Sharing God’s Bounty,” a dinner meal program at St. Philomene Parish in Sacramento, where all are welcomed and served as guests. They also made their way to Sacramento Food Bank and Family Services, to Cesar Chavez Park in Sacramento, and to a homeless camp on along the Sacramento River, where they shared a meal with about 30 homeless men and women.
To push students out of their comfort zones, Bratcher splits up the group, giving individuals different tasks: some attend Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings, while others visit the Mustard Seed School, a classroom progam for homeless children.
Intaglia, who attended an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, was surprised to find that most homeless people are not addicted to drugs or alcohol. Several students were surprised at the generosity and kindness of the homeless people they encountered. They noted that many homeless people looked out for them, urged them to get off the streets as soon as possible, and shared what little they had.
Each night, the students slept in a different spot: on concrete, on gravel, always outside. And before they slept, they prayed together and talked.
“Each night’s reflections and prayers are vital,” Maynard said, “because reflection allows the students to be intentional about their experiences and to consider what it means to ‘pick up the cross.’ Without reflection, the experience becomes shallow — it becomes just an experiment.”
On the final two nights of the immersion week, the students are allowed indoors at Loaves & Fishes, still sleeping on the floor but with a roof over their heads. They are given the more restful sleeping arrangements indoors to give them the energy for what lies ahead: During the immersion’s two final days, the students not only live with the poor but also serve them — at Friendship Park, at Wellspring Women’s Center (a hospitality house for women in the Oak Park area) and at Quinn Cottages, a transitional housing program that helps people get out of homelessness.
In interviews with The Herald on their final day of service, the students described themselves as “joyful.” “This is an emotion out of the ordinary,” junior Gus Pertel offered.
“I smell terrible, my feet hurt, but this week has been a wonderful revelation,” explained junior Travis Carter. “God is most present to me with the homeless. I feel really blessed.”
The students served lunch that afternoon at Loaves & Fishes with concentration and deep happiness. They called some of their guests by name, smiling, and served everyone in the long soup line with quiet energy, compassion and love.
