Most Fairfield students wake up in the morning in their comfortable beds, complete with a foam mattress pad and cozy sheets. They slowly get up, make some breakfast and coffee and maybe turn on the television while relaxing on the couch before beginning a hectic day.
Though most Fairfield students don’t wake up to the rumbling of a trash truck, the cold hard cement ground stabbing into their back, a flimsy cardboard box as their only shelter and the morning air chilling the tip of their nose, that is exactly what 10 Fairfield students experienced on Oct. 3.
“It was incredibly hard to fall asleep. I can honestly say there is no comfortable position when you are trying to sleep in a box,” said Molly Camp ’16. “I tried to fall asleep around 12:30, and I would say I got a total of two to three hours of sleep,”
In an effort to raise awareness for homelessness, the Students for Social Justice club set up a homeless village of cardboard boxes just outside the Oak Room on Thursday night. All students were invited to sleep outside for the night to be in solidarity with the homeless.
While 10 students slept out until 5:45 a.m., 16 students came and went throughout the evening to show support for the
cause. Moderator and campus minister Jocelyn E. Collen acknowledged the student participants, saying, “All of the S4SJ students had classes all day on Thursday and had classes and assignments due on Friday. Yet, they took time to stand in solidarity with the poor.”
Sophomore Sarah Almeida explained why she wanted to sleep out, saying, “Living on a college campus, especially in Fairfield, we don’t see people that don’t have homes everyday, so I think it’s important to make students aware that this is such a big problem.”
While the Homeless Village was moved last year to the Oak Room from the traffic circle, due to weather conditions, the club found that they were able to interact with more students walking back and forth from the library.
Camp explained that most students were genuinely interested in what the club was doing; some passersby, however, were not as respectful. According to Camp, her least favorite part of the night was when “a guy scream[ed], ‘What? Do you need a dollar or something?’”
Leading up to the event, the club posted cardboard signs around campus on Thursday displaying facts about homelessness. “Forty-two percent of homeless people are kids,” read one. “Thirty-nine percent of the homeless population is under 18 years old,” stated another.
Though only a small number of people participated in the Homeless Village, many were impacted by the signs placed around the Barone Campus Center and the Quad. Junior Kyle Wegner said, “It helped me, once again, to realize the hard truth about homelessness and how so many people are affected by it.”
Junior Kristen Seeto added, “It’s important to remember that just because you have a roof over your head, not everyone does. At least we can make people think, even for one second, what it might be like to live like this, and I think that’s really important.”
Senior Laura Stakey was one of the main organizers this year. As a third-year participant, she described the importance of the event, especially at this point in the semester by saying, “It puts things into perspective. Our schedules are getting busier now and you just think ‘Oh yeah, I’m really busy. I’m really stressed,’ but people have to do this all the time.”
She added, “You get so used to your own problems that it reminds us that there are people out there with a lot worse problems and people that we can help.”
Photos by Colin Bell/The Mirror.
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