Students spend break helping Katrina victims

More than 170 UD students from several campus groups spent spring break gutting homes, putting up roofs and listening to stories of Hurricane Katrina survivors in an effort to rebuild communities hardest hit by last summer’s storm.

Some drove themselves and friends to Mississippi and Louisiana. Some found rides in overstuffed vans borrowed from churches. Some, once there, scraped mold off walls for five-hour stretches or cleaned out refrigerators still full of food from last August.

Many paid for the trip out of their own pockets. Others raised money by scooping ice cream or flipping pancakes or writing letters to strangers. All willingly gave a week or more of their time, and in the process helped repair more than 20 homes.

One group of students took the opportunity to merge history with volunteerism.

“I felt that one way to connect students with residents of New Orleans would be to stop at important [civil rights movement] landmarks on the way down,” Kasandra Moye, director of Multicultural Programs and the Center for Black Culture, says.

To this end, the group stopped in Selma, Ala., where the 34 students went on a guided tour of the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute and visited other key sites.

“The Footsteps of Freedom tour we took on the way down really did give us a lot of good historical background, especially considering what is going on with the voting rights of displaced residents of New Orleans,” Fiona Caramba-Coker, AS ’07, says.

Once in New Orleans, these students slept at St. Augustine’s Catholic Church, the nation’s oldest African-American Catholic church. By day, they divided into two large groups to gut houses and remove and hang drywall. A third, smaller group surveyed residents for the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund.

“Nothing really prepares you for the devastation you see,” Moye says. “In the worst-hit areas, all the trees are dead, there still are possibly bodies under some of the fallen houses, and there’s an eerie silence everywhere.”

Another group of volunteers combined the efforts of students and Newark, Del., residents to lend a helping hand to Pascagoula, Miss., adopted last fall as Newark’s sister city. Led by Greg Chute, an executive director of the Town and Gown Committee and minister of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Newark, the group of 12 students and 11 residents spent a week roofing, plastering and doing general carpentry work. Newark Mayor Vance Funk accompanied the group to meet with Pascagoula officials.

Kevin Kovaleski, a graduate student in public administration, spent a good portion of his time gutting houses destroyed by water. “We left the foundations and saved the outside wooden frames, but the rest was debris that the city had to haul away,” he says.

Yet another destination for UD and community volunteers was the town of Mandaville, La., in St. Bernard’s Parish. David Blackwell, leader of Blue Hens for Christ and a minister at the Newark Church of Christ, took 30 students and five Newark residents to Mandaville to assist residents who suffered comparatively less damage than other coastal communities but couldn’t rebuild due to struggles with insurance and lost employment.

The group spent the week working on five homes, gutting out the worst of the wreckage, knocking down drywall, tearing up carpeting and taping up refrigerators.

“In some cases, there’s up to six feet of mud and goo that needs to be removed, and you need to watch out for the snakes, rats and other critters,” Blackwell says. “But, there’s always a lot to be learned from work that benefits others.”

The trip, which was funded in part by a long-running fund-raising campaign at the Newark Church of Christ, also was made possible through a $2,500 grant from UD’s Alumni Association.

Another town near New Orleans, Kenner, La., welcomed a group of 18 volunteers led by Bill Shearer, executive director and campus minister of the Wesley Foundation, UD’s Methodist association. Students installed insulation and hung drywall in three homes and, in the process, also filled the role of goodwill ambassadors by forging bonds with several temporarily displaced residents.

Bret Minix, AS ’07, says the hardest part of the trip was seeing the destruction on a human scale. “The devastation in the Ninth Ward, which was under 15 to 16 feet of water, is unimaginable,” he says. “In front of each house, there are still circles painted on the sidewalk with body count numbers.”

He recalls the 86-year-old woman who made lunch for the group every day as the volunteers worked on her and her neighbors’ homes. “I think just as important as the physical work we did was the bonding we did with the homeowners,” Minix says. “They really need to know that people from the outside care about them.”

A group of 14 students and eight city residents led by Blake Hardcastle, the University’s Baptist Student Ministry leader, traveled to East New Orleans.

“Over and over again, residents would tell us that if it weren’t for students and churches, nothing would ever get done, and they’re angry about this,” Hardcastle says.

Adam Cooke, AS ’09, says that while some residents were curious about why anyone was going to the effort of rebuilding, most were grateful for the help.

“Some neighborhoods are so obliterated that residents have had to leave,” he says, “but the people who have stayed want to stay, and they really need and appreciate the help.”

Hardcastle and his group gutted three houses that had at once been under eight feet of water. Beyond the expected battles with moldy carpets and soggy drywall, Hardcastle says the hardest part of the job was dealing with the details in the wreckage.

“It’s always important to remember that life is about more than just stuff, but we piled years and years of people’s lives up on the curb and just left everything there for trash collection,” he says.

For Ryan Moyer, CHEP ’06, and Josh Whalen, AS ’06, both members of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, their trip began last September as a frustrated urge to help. By late January, it had grown into a firm student-fueled plan. With the help of a friend, AmeriCorps volunteer Laurie Cannon, CHEP ’04, they got in touch with a volunteer organization in Holly Grove, La.

“A few interest meetings was really all it took to get the word out about the trip, and recruiting people wasn’t difficult at all,” Moyer says.

Holly Grove had been badly neglected, he says, so students worked on five houses that hadn’t been touched since the initial search and rescue mission. “It was hard to imagine the damage we’d see before we got down there,” Moyer says.

In addition to the larger group efforts, many smaller campus groups traveled to the Gulf Coast. They say the opportunity to team up with other college students from across America gave the experience an added sense of community.

“Our group at UD is fairly small, so the nine students who went down were able to work with students from several different campuses,” Steve Baker, area director for Campus Crusade for Christ, says. Work involved tearing out drywall, ripping up carpet, kicking down ceilings and gutting everything up to the nine-foot watermark in several houses.

Jodi Roth, senior Jewish Campus Service Corps fellow at UD’s Kristol Center for Jewish Life, organized a 10-student group from Hillel that went to Gulfport, Miss., for the week. She says that she found the spirit of volunteerism was strengthened by teaming up with virtual strangers.

“The hurricane did not discriminate, so we met people from all walks of life,” Roth says. “We met up with five other Hillel groups, but we worked with Christian groups, too.” She and her crew spent the week gutting houses and putting on 11 roofs in five days.

Chloe Sommers, AS ’08, who spent the week roofing with the Hillel group, says she plans to go back again this summer.

When acquaintances asked why she wasn’t going on vacation during spring break, she says, “I told them I wanted to go down to see if the destruction really was as bad as the media said, and I found out it was. Down South, there’s a pre-Katrina life and a post-Katrina life.”

Many of the volunteers say the benefits flowed both ways.

“Money is always an important factor in any rebuilding effort, but there are greater gifts than financial support,” Chute says. “Volunteerism and just works fulfill a need in each of us.”

Petra Palmer, AS ’07, part of the Center for Black Culture group, says that hearing the stories of survival and loss made her grateful for what she has.

“I may not be the richest person in the world, but at least I have a place to come home to,” she says. “A lot of us concentrate on all the things we don’t have and take a lot for granted. This was a very humbling and rewarding experience.” 

—Becca Hutchinson