Adrienne Mills never anticipated that she would one day have only enough money to budget $1 for dinner. Growing up in Los Altos, the 17-year-old said her parents had always provided her with everything she needed and most of what she wanted. Over a week-long service project in San Jose last month sponsored by St. Francis High School, Smith and 29 other high school students learned to live a life more simple than any of them were accustomed - one where they ate alongside the homeless, slept on the floor and shared one shower.
Sal Chavez, director of the St. Francis High School Campus Ministry program, helped launch the pilot program this year, bringing together students from five affiliated Holy Cross schools throughout the country to San Jose.
"We wanted (the students) to be a part of something bigger than just St. Francis," Chavez said. "We wanted them to experience the poverty and homelessness in the inner-city area."
Seven St. Francis students and five students from each of the four participating Holy Cross schools in New Orleans, San Antonio, Los Angeles and Hayward lived in two rooms in a former convent at St. Joseph's Parish. The students worked together at various shelters, soup kitchens, hospitals and community centers each day of the program doing everything from teaching English to immigrants and serving food to driving the elderly to medical appointments.
Samantha Smith, who will be a senior at St. Francis this fall, said those who volunteered for the project learned to appreciate the present. "We never asked about the future. We never knew where we were going or what we would be doing. We just went out and reached many levels of the community," she said.
For Mills, the week was an "eye-opening experience. It put us in the shoes of the poor of the area and made us equal to them. We were completely immersed in the work. We didn't do charity and then go home," she said.
Mills said the week "was kind of hard on me." She said when the counselors gave her a dollar and told her to use it to buy dinner at a 7-11 store, she thought it was joke.
"I was really mad," she said. "I thought, 'How could they do this. We paid for this trip, and they're rationing us a dollar.'"
Mills said she and about seven other teens pooled their money to buy two packages of spaghetti, a can of tomato sauce and some hot-dog buns.
Looking back, Mills said the experience humbled her a lot.
"It really put me in someone else's shoes," she said. "I had cravings for certain foods that I couldn't afford to buy, but I realize that so do others who have to do with what they can get."
Mills said her turning point came when she had to eat across the table from a mother and her two children at a soup kitchen.
"Only a couple bad circumstances separated me from them. I was not that much different," she said.
Smith said the week changed her perspectives, too.
"We complained a lot about having to share one shower. At the time, it was a huge ordeal, but it wasn't as big of a deal as we made it out to be," Smith said. By the end of the week, "I thought 'how selfish of us. We're complaining about one shower, and some people don't have a roof over their heads. That should be the least of our problems.'"
Mills and Smith said they plan to continue to volunteer at the soup kitchen Loaves and Fishes.