Survival.

Getting by on a tiny paycheck in Los Angeles means cutting a lot of corners -- whether it's legal or not

ON Skid Row, day care means paying a lady who lives in your building a few bucks a day to watch your preschoolers, who are put into a small room with a dozen other children and lulled into complacency with a TV.

Health care means buying penicillin pills from a guy on the street.

Transportation means tooling around in a $200 jalopy, without insurance, registration or even a driver's license.

These are just a few of the survival strategies for the very poor in Los Angeles -- the thousands who live at or below the federal poverty level and take home, in a year, about as much as some Angelenos spend on a single vacation or a Rodeo Drive shopping spree.

A full-time worker making California's minimum wage of $5.75 an hour would take home less than $12,000 a year. In L.A., where the working poor serve as day laborers, garment workers or domestic help, many get by on $10,000 a year or less -- and even manage to support a family on that salary.

To be sure, there are a host of social services available to the poor. Food stamps, federal child-care supplements, Medi-Cal, welfare and earned income tax credits mean the difference between hunger and something resembling comfort. But most social services are available only to U.S. citizens, and many of L.A.'s poor are illegal immigrants. Even those eligible for the services tend not to use them, either out of pride or because they don't know they exist. Some estimates suggest that less than half the people in L.A. who are eligible for food stamps actually use them.

The main coping mechanism is togetherness. Which is to say that family groups, even acquaintances, group as many wage earners as possible in a single house or apartment or even garage. That way, you can split the cost of rent among a lot of people.

The other strategies, according to those who work closely with the poor and homeless, can be summed up in a single phrase: You do what you have to do.

Girls as young as 6 or 7 are left to babysit even younger children while their parents and older siblings are off at work. Dangerous? Of course. But the parents can't afford to pay for child care, and they can't support the family without going to work.

Thousands of Angelenos drive without insurance, and many undocumented aliens drive without licenses. They could take the bus, but ironically, it's often more expensive to use public transit in Los Angeles than it is to drive a cheap used car, as long as you're not paying for registration or insurance.

It's the kind of life that's fraught with peril. Living on the edge, there is always the danger that something devastating could happen. There could be a fire in the apartment building where the children are staying, the car could be impounded after a routine traffic stop, and so on.

Add to this the fear of even darker times. Many low-income Angelenos work in seasonal jobs. Day laborers might take home as much as $1,400 in a good month, but as little as $300 in a bad one. In the garment industry, there is plenty of work when the manufacturing season is in high gear, but in other months the jobs simply dry up.

"As miserable as it is, for a lot of people it's a step up from what they left in Mexico and Central America--and a lot of them are actually figuring out ways to send money home," said Frank Tamborello, an advocate with the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness. "They're very good at saving money."

What follows are glimpses into the survival skills of the poor in L.A., as it relates to food, housing, health care, transportation and education.