Cardboard city.

Cardboard city.

Cardboard city is run by “Mary, Queen of all Saints” parish. Karrie M. Davis runs the actual youth group, which I’m involved in. Cardboard city just passed its fourth year in the making. It normally only last one night but we decided to make it last two nights this year. Cardboard city started on April 16, 2010 Friday at 6:00pm. We were not fed dinner that night and we were forced to make houses out of a limited amount of cardboard and duct tape. We do lessons about the catholic religion, feel how it is to be homeless, and do service projects all day for others.

The night that we got there, we had to get water, while it was raining. This cardboard city, we were to have no running water at all. So if we wanted something to drink, then we would have to walk to my house, which was exactly 2.4 miles, and about 47mins worth of walking (check “327 velde ave. Pennsauken NJ, 08110” to “4851 Camden Avenue Pennsauken, NJ 08110-1920” on Google maps). The group I had walked slowly, so I would say it took about an hour and fifteen mins to get to my house. As we were walking there, we had a crate filled with empty water bottles and a big Gatorade jug and we filled it all up with water from the hose. We then had to walk back to the Church while it was raining and will all the water bottles and jugs filled with water.

We have a curfew of 1:00am. It rained pretty hard earlier but stopped and was only drizzling. Throughout the night it rained hard on and off. That morning we were fed a limited one small bowl of cereal. Then we were split up into groups that would do different service projects. One group stayed at the church and painted children’s faces at a fair that was being held. Another group went into Camden to clean up crack dens, and the other group went into Philly and begged for money on Market Street.

The people who stayed at the fair had the easiest job. They go to sit at a table and do what every the kids wanted them to do. Sometimes they would get done doing a half an hour’s worth of work on a kids face and then another one would come up and ask for the same thing. They were not allowed to accept any food from anyone and were not allowed to buy any food of any sort. The only thing that they could put in their mouths was their thumb and water from their water bottle.

The teens that went into Camden had to have a strong stomach. They were forced to paint, clean up, and take insults from anyone walking by. The house they were cleaning up were called “crack den”, in which homeless people would live there and some people would do drugs there. They had to be careful of what they touched because there were feces in the corners of the rooms and used needles on the ground that they had to clean up.

I was not involved in any of them group but was involved in the group that went into Pennsylvania. We stereotyped the homeless outlook by making signs on cardboard. Some of us put funny things like “ I bet you can’t hit me with a quarter” and “ Ninjas have taken my family for ransom. Need money for kung-fu lessons.” We sat on the sidewalk and begged for money. The people holding these signs did not get much money. Some people were being very flamboyant with speaking to people on the streets saying that we need money to go back home. Originally I just sat on some steps, put a bowel out, and looked down every time someone walked past me. I did not get much money because I was holding one of the not so serious signs up. I then put a statistic on the sign about homeless teens in America. It was something like “ there are about 500,00 homeless teens throughout America and most of them are homeless because of abusive/ sexual exploded guardians and family.” People walked by and stared and read the sign until I looked them in the eye and then they turned around.

There was a very awkward moment while I had that sign up. As I was holding the sign, a buss filled with high school teenagers went by and stopped at a red light where i was. The whole bus was dead silent because they were all reading my sign. They said nothing nor made any faces towards me. They just read the sign and then looked at me for explanation.

Since I was sitting on the step all by myself with no sign at one point, people really thought I was homeless. I had a sense that people started to look at me differently. Like I dropped off the social class level and I was a peasant back in the renaissance time. Like people didn’t even think of me as a human, more like an animal that nobody wants to take responsibility for.