Lost in America

Yeah, the youth down here is really violent. I mean, I've

been beat up, I think about,

maybe, three times in the past two weeks. Um, I don't know,

it's kind of rough. I mean, I've

been punked for my backpack before; I've been punked for

everything I own. A girl named

Scrapy, she came up while I was asleep and took my backpack out

from underneath my head and

dumped out all my stuff, gave me a smaller backpack, threw it at

me and then took my big ol'

backpack; it was like a big traveler's backpack, and I tried

to get it back and she wouldn't

give it back to me so.

Why do you think people mess with you?

Because I'm young, because I'm new.

And so this is where I usually sleep. I

usually put my sleeping bag down

on the rocks and or, uh, sit up

here. If I'm like hanging out

with people this is kind of like where we sit; we sit on the

ledge. We usually hang out, do

whatever. When I, when I come down here, I mean, if I'm down

here just by myself I do think

about my family, I guess. I kind of don't just wonder what

they're doing, I wonder how my

dad is. My dad hates gays, which is his exact words.

And he says because I'm gay that I'm not his

kid and all this other stuff.

He bust a couple of my ribs, which

was the last altercation that we

had before I just said I was done. I haven't seen my dad

since then.

I don't know, down here it's kind of hard.

The thing that's hard for

me is getting to sleep. Because

when you sleep down here, you know, as for instance, you're

sleeping on rocks, or you're

sleeping on cement. You know, it's kind of hard to get

comfortable when you've got a backpack for a pillow.

Um, Kayla is my legal name;

the reason why I changed it is

because I'm a transgender. The fact that I'm a girl really does

not make me happy.

- How does that feel? - Does that feel liberating?

I don't know, I guess it kind of makes

me feel better, you know? I guess it makes me feel more

comfortable because, I don't know, it just makes me feel like

I'm more comfortable in my own

skin, you know? It makes me feel

like I'm one of the guys, whatever. You know?

What would your dad say if he saw you like that?

If my dad saw me he'd probably kick my ass.

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses

yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming

shore. Send these, the homeless,

tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus

When I had to sell myself for shelter, um, yeah, I thought

about my family and wondered why they couldn't help me.

In America, every night children sleep on the streets.

A growing number of people on the streets are

children and young adults.

And how do we treat these kids?

Do we embrace them? Do we build

them shelters, feed and take care of them?

You guys gotta go.

But, we just want food.

Okay, you're still bothering the customers.

Can you help us?

No.

We look at these kids as if homelessness

is a disease as if it's something that could be caught.

When I was washing my hair in a Denny's bathroom sink,

and my head was, uh, too tall to fit from the faucet down to the

bottom of the sink so I was in it sideways, trying to wash my

hair. And when I flipped my hair up I got water, kind of, all

over the mirror, and I looked in the mirror and I saw the women

behind me that couldn't wash their hands because I was

washing my hair and the look on their face was, they were so

disgusted by me.

Or we ignore them, and pretend they don't exist.

This myth that there are kids who don't

have anything to eat is a total lie. And...

It is absolutely not a lie, and there actually are students,

Oh, it is absolutely a total lie on a mass level!

It all started after, like, I lost my grandmother, and then I

lost my grandfather, and then while we were at, like, getting

ready for my grandfather's

funeral I got a call that my best friend back

home passed away. Yeah, that sucked.

So that was pretty devastating for him. And

he had lived with his grandparents too, so to lose

someone that he lived with for so long...

I can't believe that we allow two million of our children to

be on the street. That's how little we actually care about

what's happening with youth in America.

And unfortunately for them, nothing's changing.

There are kids in New York City who go all

weekend without having anything to eat except

Oh, that is the biggest bologna I have... You, you...

How many of you in the last few

weeks have gone to bed hungry?

Most of you've never met with these youths, or if you've met

them you didn't know they were homeless. If you've met them and

knew them you know they don't want to be, you know they want

out. You'd know that they want

to come back being part of society. And I'd tell you this

one thing: we're a lesser

society if we don't bring them

back, we're a better society if we do.

My name is Rotimi Rainwater, and when I was

nineteen I was homeless.

I was in the Navy and my mother got cancer and by the

time I got out, she had lost her place. It took a while, but I

got off the streets and now I am a director. In 2010, I made a

film called Sugar about homeless

youth. I went all over the country screening the film for

homeless youth organizations and

everywhere I went, kids came up asking me for help and I didn't

know why. Like many, I had

assumed this was an issue our government was dealing with.

- In this country, teenagers. - And if that isn't shocking

But the more I look, I realize it's not. I eventually got the

chance to screen Sugar for Congress, but not one member of

Congress showed up. And sitting

there I began to wonder, is this an issue they don't care about?

Would they just rather sweep it under the rug and pretend it

doesn't exist? So I decided to do the only thing I could, which

is make a film. Because I wanted

to find out why in America there are so many of our children

sleeping on our streets. As I hit the road I've decided to try

to find out how many kids are homeless.

According to Google, the numbers are between 48,000 and

2.8 million, which is ridiculous. So we've headed to

Washington D.C. to figure out if anyone knows how many kids are

on the streets.

How many homeless youth do you think there are in America?

Five thousand.

Five thousand.

The number was like 40,000 homeless like

two years ago, something like that.

I feel having a thousand is a bit much, is it?

I could honestly have no clue about

that. There's so many that

I just don't know the number now.

Who knows for sure? You never do.

We, we, gen-We genuinely don't know the exact numbers.

Gotta be in the hundreds of thousands of kids.

There's over a million nationwide.

There are estimates, um, that

could be undercounts of 1.9 million.

HUD published a report that said it was 40,000.

So we know that we don't do a good job of counting youth.

Is it forty thousand or is it two million? That's not

a good place to be if you can't, if you don't know which.

The reason that we don't know how many kids are

on the street is that it cost a

lot of money to do that kind of research. In the Runaway and

Homeless Youth Act, that has yet

to pass in congress, there is funding that would be associated

with doing an annual study to really get our arms around how

many kids are we really talking about?

Wait a minute, so there's never been a national

study on homeless youth?

That's correct.

How can that be? Our government has funded some of the most

ridiculous studies. From three million dollars to study the

video game World of Warcraft's effect on helping companies

compete more effectively in the

global marketplace, to hundreds of thousands of dollars to study

why chimpanzees throw poop;

literally, throw poop. But our government can't tell us, with

any certainty, how many of our

children are sleeping on the streets at any time. Why has

there never been a study done?

It's not important to them, I don't

think. They've not done it because there hasn't been any

money for it. They don't want to put any money towards it. And so

if they say there's a homeless

youth issue, then they have to

figure out how to address it.

Why is there such a lack of compassion for these

kids? In America, there are over

5,000 shelters for animals, but yet there's less than 400 for

kids. The answer is simple,

there is a stigma that surrounds

you when you're on the streets.

You're not seen as a child anymore, you're seen as

homeless, dirty, unwanted.

No one wakes up one day and

says, "Hi, today I want to be homeless".

Why do you think, um, kids are homeless?

Um, because they want to, sometimes.

I can promise you, 95% of those

children do not want to be on the streets.

There's a strong misconception

that young people leave home just to do drugs.

Most of them, because most of

them out there are like drug addicts.

Maybe it's alcohol use?