Reporter

[bharbihazarika]

Bitter weather demands LA officials to open winter shelters for the homeless early this year

Homeless man walking in DTLA. (Credits: Wikimedia commons)

    –Bharbi Hazarika

The upcoming rains this week will not only dampen thanksgiving dinners but worsen the living conditions of thousands of homeless people in LA ahead of the winter season.

As inclement weather looms on the horizon, Los Angeles County officials opened winter shelters early on Tuesday. Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), initially planning to launch shelters in December, said it would open up 271 beds at seven locations throughout the city in the next few days.

“With serious winter weather impacting our community ahead of the launch date of the Winter Shelter Program, LAHSA, the City of Los Angeles, and the County of Los Angeles saw it was necessary to open these shelters immediately to help as many of our most vulnerable residents as possible,” said Peter Lynn, Executive Director at LAHSA, in a press release.

According to the weather forecast, heavy rains are expected to drench the city on Wednesday and Thursday. Throughout this week, the shelters -- usually open from 5 p.m. to 7 a.m. -- will remain open around the clock.

These shelters are available on a first-come-first-served basis and are situated in the following locations:

Skid Row: Weingart, 566 S. San Pedro St., Los Angeles

Hollywood: Salvation Army, 5941 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles

Hyde Park: Bryant Temple AME Church, 2514 W. Vernon Ave, Los Angeles

Vermont Square: Home at Last, 5171 S. Vermont St., Los Angeles

Central-Alameda: Home at Last, 5100 S. Central Ave., Los Angeles

Central-Alameda: Home at Last, 2108 S. Central Ave., Los Angeles

Vermont-Slauson: Home at Last, 5500 S. Hoover Ave., Los Angeles

Additional shelters will open across the county on Dec. 1, offering up to 1231 beds across Los Angeles county, according to LAHSA. They will remain available through March 31, 2020.

These shelters, which are offered as a resource for the homeless to escape the cold and wet weather, in reality, will hardly accommodate a sliver of the homeless population in LA that tallied over 36,000 in 2019.

[bharbihazarika]

These parents are embracing a nomadic approach to education, here is why?

Betsy Lee and family in Diani Beach, Kenya. (Credits: Betsy Lee)

   – Bharbi Hazarika

In 2015, Betsy Lee bought six one-way tickets to Cabuya, Costa Rica, on a whim. The screen turned blue with a familiar spinning logo that indicated their tickets were being processed. She looked at her husband, Matthew Frye, who was sitting beside her. Their eyes met in the soft glow from the screen in front of them, and before she could sputter out the words “What have we done?” she got an email alert confirming their flight.

“We were very nervous, we couldn’t believe what we were getting ourselves into,” Lee, learning architect at Sweet Rush, a California-based corporate training company, said. “Now, when I look back, all those nerves seem silly.”

Three years have passed, and she hasn’t bought a round trip ticket since. The family has been traveling the world non-stop, hopping from small fishing villages of Costa Rica to settling in hilly pockets of Kenya, months at a time. The couple and their four kids are on an excursion of an enormous scale. Twenty countries, four continents, and tête-à-têtes with countless people have brought them to a single conclusion— settling down is passé.

And passé it is or at least it seems that way as families across the United States and around the world have increasingly started embracing a new notion of living and learning called world schooling.

World schooling is an educational movement that is distinct from “stationary” or traditional education, encouraging parents and children to learn via travel and interaction. Several online groups and blogs with thousands of subscribers have breathed life into a subculture that several still see as a dream.

The main idea behind this movement is experiential learning, that places its bets on student learning while doing a task. For most families, learning is extended to parents, as well.

Betsy Lee and her family in Iten, Kenya. (Credits: Betsy Lee) 

World schooling veers away from a fixed standard curriculum, attendance, and confinement of traditional classrooms, rejects even the slightly less limiting daily routine offered in homeschooling; instead, it introduces global experiences to the syllabus. World schooling, if broken down to its essentials, is homeschooling but on steroids. “We are basically using the world as a classroom,” Lee said. “It requires you to look and learn, engage with the community, and, most importantly, be outside.”

Alyson Long, editor at World Travel Family, a resource for those seeking tips on traveling, and her husband, who have been traveling with their two kids for the past five years, believe it offers her kids an entrepreneurial take on education.

“If we weren’t world schooling our kids, they wouldn’t have free time to explore what truly interests them,” Long said. “A childhood taken up by algebra and passing tests leaves little time to follow dreams and passions and start their own entrepreneurial income streams early.”