Learning to Beg: Saying hello

In her column “Learning to Beg,” Sharis Hsu ’28 recounts the stories of individuals experiencing homelessness that she met during her Alternative Spring Break trip to Georgia.

I’m out of breath when I round the corner of EVGR-A. 

It’s 2:32 a.m. 

I’m two minutes late.

Thankfully, most of our group is tardier than I am. I massage my temples as we wait for the rest of our group to arrive. 24 hours ago, I was taking three final exams, yet now I’m deliriously climbing into a UberXXL that is speeding towards our flight bound for Atlanta, Georgia. 

Four months ago, I accepted a spot on an Alternative Spring Break trip focused on rural and urban homelessness in Georgia. At that point, the trip felt very theoretical, and very far away. But as I heap pasta onto my plate in our Airbnb kitchen, it doesn’t feel so theoretical anymore.

The next morning, my body and brain are both still in California time. It feels like 5 a.m. as we pull up next to a black fence and tumble out onto the sidewalk. The perimeter of the property is lined by an eight-foot fence, but a tall brick building stands in the center. At the top of the building is The Salvation Army logo. 

The entrance mirrors that of a low security prison. We are buzzed in through a gate in the metal fence, then down a fenced path through the courtyard, through another door, and yet another till we are on the inside of the facility. Christian music plays in the background as we’re led down the hallway to the kitchen which is shrouded behind metal bars. 

Miss Ashia, a staff member at the Salvation Army, appears, wearing a black chef’s jacket and with her hair pulled back into a tight bun. 

“Ya’ll are a big group,” she comments before directing us to wash our hands and put on a pair of gloves. Inside the overwhelmingly large industrial kitchen, she puts the twelve of us to work. Two people wash dishes, others lay out frozen sausages, some scrub the oven while others form an assembly line of coffee kits. 

Miss Ashia takes me over by the sink and hands me eight heads of iceberg lettuce. 

“You’re going to be making our salad today,” she instructs. “I want you to chop up this lettuce as finely as possible, and then we’ll add some carrots and some tomatoes.”

I oblige, pulling off the brown parts of the lettuce. She works next to me dicing tomatoes. 

“I just got a promotion to head chef,” she tells me. “I used to cook for my home catering business.”

“Is it different working here?” I ask.

“Not as much as you would think,” she declares. “We have our menu, and we have our kitchen. Sometimes we don’t have the produce and we must stretch things, but we try to make things work.”

I open my mouth to ask another question, but she is called away to stir a vat of chicken-tortilla soup. Silenced, I continue chopping the mountain of iceberg lettuce till I feel the familiar ache of my self-diagnosed carpal tunnel returning in my right wrist. 

The salad comes together quickly, though there is a wide assortment of lettuce sizes due to my poor knife skills. I load the salad into big steel trays, then take them over to the serving lines where a tray of sandwiches awaits.

“This is the calm before the storm,” Miss Ashia tells us. “We feed the women and children at 11:30, then the men can come in at 12.”

I smile in relief and strip my sweaty gloves and itchy hairnet. The collection of shiny steel and heavy pans in this kitchen reminds me vaguely of my days as a server at a local Japanese restaurant. 

But this is different. 

There are bars across the kitchen entrance, and blue lunch trays like those from my elementary school lined up. Everything is strictly portioned — the soup diluted four times — to make sure that it stretches as far as possible. 

11:30 arrives quickly, and I am behind the line slapping mayo packets on trays.

This is the closest I’ve ever been to a homeless person.

This is the first time I’ve spoken to a homeless person.

Some of the women meet my eye, a select few smile back at me. Half of them have kids under the age of eight who trail them closely. I spot one woman with a baby, probably less than six weeks old, strapped to her chest. 

This is what it means to be homeless?

The wave of women soon passes, and we dump yet more boiling water into the soup to make it last longer. Right on time, the men arrive grabbing their trays wordlessly and heading into the dining area. There are few and far between thanks, as I smile back at them.

Eventually, Pengyu relieves me from mayo duty. I slip off the line, pull off my plastic apron and walk out of the kitchen. In the corner of the hallway stands a man in a full suit with a pocket watch and a clipboard. 

A wave of confidence cascades over me, and I walk to him.

“Do you work here, sir?” I ask, my lips moving faster than I can stop them. 

“Yes,” he states, looking up from his clipboard. “My name is Freddie, been here for a little bit now.”

I return his firm handshake, peeking into the dining room behind him. Freddie tells me he has just finished his master’s in psychology, and that his work at the Salvation Army is part of his research. He tells me that every individual living in this facility has experienced a trauma from ages three to six that derails their life at some point or another. 

I ask him about the kids here with their families.

He tells me he will see them again as homeless adults.

It’s almost as if he can sense my shock at his hopelessness on the issue. He pivots to asking me about my major, my time at Stanford, the impact I hope to have on the world.

I tell him I’m studying bioengineering, that I work in the neurodegenerative disease space and someday I probably want to engineer drugs, the good kind. 

“Sugar,” he tells me. “Someday, I want you to make me a drug for stupid.”

I blink back at him.

“They aren’t stupid,” he corrects, gesturing at the dining room behind him. “But something is fundamentally broken and I can’t fix it. I need a pill for that.”

“If I could, I would,” I tell him, leaving out the fact that I’m a sophomore in college who struggles to finish p-sets or wrap my head around biophysics. “But I don’t know if that’s possible.”

Freddie shakes his head. “You better make it happen. You go to Stanford.”

His walkie-talkie buzzes and then he’s rushing away.

I stand alone with my back pressed against the whitewashed brick hallway. 48 hours ago, I was in my dorm room thinking I would fail my final exams. Today I’m on the other side of the U.S., in a state I’ve never been to, with people I barely know and with my hands brushing against an issue I barely understand. 

I’ve never felt so lost before, but I choose to embrace it. 

Georgia, whatever you have to tell me, my heart is open. 

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