By Jake Seman
For three nights every year, a group of first-year students spend
three days and nights homeless. The students are part of Associate
Professor of Political Science Richard Leitch’s First-Term Seminar
(FTS) on homelessness. The students spend the three days living as if
they were homeless.
The students sleep outside in cardboard boxes or on the floor in
Christ Chapel. During the day, the students sit outside the Market
Place waiting for other students to give them food, asthey are not
allowed to buy the food themselves.
“We go to the [Market Place] around meal times, and we’re not
allowed to go in the [Market Place] and ask for food, so we just have
to sit outside and wait for people to bring us food,” First-year
Jessica Flannery said.
Many of the participants say the toughest part of the Sleep Out is sleeping.
“[Sleeping outside] has been really difficult,” First-year Allyson
Voss said. “I expected it to be kind of like camping … but the first
night I slept about two-and-half hours. I didn’t fall asleep until four
o’clock in the morning.”Though many of the students try to sleep
outside, the cold drives them inside.
“The first night I tried to sleep outside, until my box collapsed on
me. Then I got really cold, so I came inside [Christ Chapel],” Flannery
said.
However, sleeping in Christ Chapel can present its own challenges.
“Even in [Christ Chapel], it’s tough to get a good night’s sleep, [with
sleeping] on the floor and all the distractions,” First-year Amber
Barry said.
Students say that they also gain an understanding of how difficult
it can be to be homeless. “You’re just exhausted. You go to class and
you can’t concentrate very well,“ Flannery said. “You have no
motivation to do anything. When you don’t have to go to class, you just
want to sit there and do nothing because you are so exhausted.”
However, the students admit that they have only a taste of what the nation’s homeless go through every year.
“It’s been a lot harder than you would think, and we’ve only had a
glimpse of it. We know when it’s over; if you’re really homeless, you
don’t know,” First-year Kari Peirson said.
The students are participating in the National Hunger and
Homelessness Awareness Week, which is always the week before
Thanksgiving. The Sleep-Out is the signature event of the week, and it
is meant to educate students on what it means to be homeless.
“The people who are doing it are certainly learning a lot,” Leitch
said. “The whole point of it is to educate people about why
homelessness exists.”
This is the ninth year that Leitch has taught the FTS on homelessness and the twelfth year he has participated in the Sleep Out.
“Gustavus had a Sleep Out tradition before I got here,” Leitch said.
“There was a student group [that] decided they were going to do a real
‘Sleep Out’ in recognition of Hunger and Homelessness Week [in 1998],
and I participated in that. The Chapel was closed at midnight, like it
usually is, and from midnight until six in the morning, we were all
under lights in front of that locked chapel. For me, that was really
powerful.”
After that experience, Leitch was inspired to create an FTS class on
homelessness. He made the Sleep Out part of that class. The students
who participated in the Sleep Out learned a lot from the experience.
I think [the Sleep Out] is so critical to the class,” Flannery said.
“You can talk about what you think could change things or what you
could do to change these people’s lives, but … it makes you see things
from a different light.”
According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, between 1.6
million and 3.5 million people experience homelessness in a year. On a
given night, about 38 percent of the homeless are children. Due to the
recent foreclosure crisis, homelessness has been on the rise across the
country.
The twelfth annual Hunger and Homelessness Week is sponsored by
Actions Supporting All People (ASAP). ASAP also hosted a Hunger Banquet
on Thursday, and the Gustavus chapter of Amnesty International is
holding a food drive. Donations may be left in marked boxes outside the
Market Place and the Community Service Center.
