Skid Row Observations

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Work at a Shelter Last year I took part in an active community outreach at a shelter for five hours in Skid Row slum in Los Angeles. This helped me to connect with the people in the area and learn their way of living, understand their immediate needs and the problems that they face in their living environment. What is observed from the experience? I took my time to make my observation in my study and noticed several things about people living in Skid Row area. I visited the area from 8 O’clock in the morning up to 12 o’clock noon. It is not such a pleasant site at first. I am first met by the sight of drunken people staggering in an unspecified direction. Some lay down on the floor of pavements looking dirty and unkempt. Majority of them are street children between the age of five and twenty five years. I presume that they are most probably homeless or having been abandoned by their parents and pushed to the streets to find a living. There are both male and female genders; they seem to coexist closely without any dispute at all. Those on the streets are carrying some polythene bags that you can hardly tell what is inside, but I presume that it is either a material to lay on during the night in the streets and food that they gather from the streets. As I pass through the dark alleys of Skid Row, I tend to attract a lot …show more content…

About five minutes of my watch on the mushrooming slum, I see several papers fly from the squeezed houses into air landing on whatever places found as target. When they become really common that is when I realize that these are flying toilets. The area has inadequate sanitary facilities and this is the best way they can disposed their faecal discharge. The drainage itself is poor and people are really finding it hard to walk through the

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