Helping the Homeless

This week we talked about homelessness. How do people become homeless? How can we help them?

The timing was appropriate as I am going on a missions trip with my church to Los Angeles this week to work with the Dream Center. They serve 80,000 people a month and are open 24 hours a day.
We will be hitting the streets in some very rough areas to try to get people into the Dream Center where they will be fed, cleaned, clothed and hopefully enrolled in a long term program to get them off of the streets for good.

We started our discussion by just saying words that you think of when you see a homeless person.

The list was lengthy and included the following:

dirty
hungry
not attractive
sad
scared
bad clothes
lazy
hopeless 
tired

Then we talked about what could have happened to make them homeless and these things came up:

they dropped out of school
they quit their job or got fired
they did drugs or were alcoholics
they broke the law
they were born into it







We discussed how all of those descriptions may be true and they maybe made some bad choices but they were people just like us who just lost their way and maybe they needed someone to give them hope and a chance again.

We watched a youtube video called "make the homeless smile". It is a couple of young guys who give out food, clothes, water and some money to the homeless and shake their hands and give hugs.
It showed the girls how easy it is to make someone smile.

Off to our project which was making up bags to hand out to homeless people on the streets rather than just giving them money.

My boys love doing this and we keep bags in the car all of the time and have one handy if we see someone on the corner asking for help.







The girls came up with this list of things that they thought would be helpful:

Food/water, blanket, pillow, money, shoes, coats, comb, tooth brush/tooth paste, rain poncho.

I had purchased all of these things at the Dollar Tree to make up 5 bags and of course the girls had to make up some cards to add a personal message and some drawings.

As our team activity we broke up into small groups and had to figure out how to make a budget work.
I gave them a list of monthly bills and a monthly salary and the bills went over what they would be bringing in. They needed to decided together how they could cut down or eliminate certain things to make the budget work.

Each team worked separately but they all agreed that eliminating Eating Out and Cable TV would be a good idea. They would settle for Netflix for $10 per month.
They also agreed to sell the car and ride their bike or take the bus. Oh to be 8 years old again and enjoying biking everywhere right?

We were done with all of the hard work.
Now it was time for a snack and hair painting.

I have purple streaks in my hair and they all wanted to have some so I got out the washable red and purple paint I have.

My lovely assistants became stylists.

Lots of fun, great ideas and discussion! These girls make me proud.

No SuperGirls next Friday or the 4th of July. See you on the 11th!