This past spring break, many students traveled across the country, but for 70 West Chester University students, New Orleans was their destination as they helped clean up destruction from Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina occurred nearly seven months ago, but much of the city looks as if the hurricane just moved through, specifically the area where the levee broke at the Lower Ninth Ward, which has an incredible and astounding amount of destruction. While there is evidence that the levee is being repaired, for the majority of the homes in the Lower Ninth Ward, it looks as if nothing where their homes once stood has been touched.
President Bush was quoted in the days following the hurricane stating, “We are dealing with one of the worst natural disasters in our nation’s history” and for many people in New Orleans, that disaster has not left their minds. For the 70 WCU students who traveled to New Orleans through the Campus Crusade for Christ relief effort, they saw first hand the massive destruction.
The students left West Chester in the afternoon on Mar 10 to travel by bus to New Orleans for nine days. As the bus approached the area where the students would be staying, the noise of students talking in the bus slowly started to die down as they began to see restaurants with fluorescent signs blown out of their structure, entire shopping centers closed for business, trees chopped off halfway and homes with the word “Help” spray painted across them. The excitement and energy for the work that these students would be doing was tremendous but the initial sites of devastation were incredible.
As students lined up on the sidewalk to receive their dinner for the first night, many cars driving through the Ninth Ward slowed down a little and beeped, gave a thumbs up, waved or said “thank you.” Many residents were eager to offer their thanks to students that wanted to help.
During the second full day in New Orleans, students received information on how to gut a house and exactly what some of the spray paint on the houses meant. The Xs on each of the homes indicated the date that the house was searched and the number of dead bodies including pets found within a home. Each home was to be divided into piles of personal belongings, chemical materials, electric materials and debris. They needed to be thoroughly gutted down to their initial structure.
For WCU students, this meant that each student was working alongside ten others to gut a house for a full day if not two. Many of the homes that students would work in had not even been opened closed before the storm. With water damage, black mold and completely water soaked possessions within the houses, there was an incredible amount of work to be done to gut an entire house. Students would leave for their work site at 9 a.m. each morning and work until 5 p.m. that day.
Some of the most emotionally moving images that students saw were on the way to their work site each day: houses that displayed a water line far above the doorway, overturned cars, houses that had collided with other houses or moved to the middle of a roadway, speed boats next to highways, and even a house that read “Thanks for the help FEMA” across the front of it. Throughout this destruction, however, there were some homeowners that had returned, others living in trailers in front of their houses and some people working on cars in their driveways and trying to rebuild.
The homeowner at one work site, Jodice, told the story of her 71-year-old neighbor who made national news because of his “stubbornness,” as she described. After refusing to evacuate as Hurricane Katrina approached, the elderly man was left in his home by his family. He managed to survive for 11 days in his attic and seven days in the rest of his house with only a bottle of water. Finally, on the 18th day, just as he was running out of water, he was rescued.
Jodice, a resident of New Orleans for 10 years, had never left for a hurricane before Katrina. She said that this time she “had a feeling” and decided to evacuate. She knew that all of her possessions were gone.
For the majority of the residents of New Orleans, they have had to come to grips with the harsh reality that many if not all of their belongings were lost to the hurricane. For residents of the Lower Ninth Ward this reality is exactly what they deal with on a daily basis. It is an area of New Orleans that has faced almost complete destruction, as the breaking of the levee had severe effects on all of the homes surrounding it.
As students toured this area in minivans with the tail gate and side doors open, there was a sense of astonishment looking at the houses that they were viewing. To see a car completely plowed through the middle of a house, a house uplifted on top of a car, homes with their entire front wall blown off and houses that were just a complete pile of wreckage. Specifically the area surrounding where the levee broke where only foundations stood to houses and many houses only had steps left that once led to a front door.
Students in Campus Crusade for Christ commented on some of the memories and emotions that they experienced while in New Orleans. “One of the saddest things I remember was driving by a house that was missing a wall, where all the person’s belongings were spilling out of it, and sitting on top of the belongings was a teddy bear with a life jacket on,” said sophomore Jenn Horton. Seth Windle, a first-year student and member of Campus Crusade said, “the most powerful thing that I witnessed was the amount of gratitude and thanks the people gave us for volunteering our time. It was awesome to see God at work while we were down there.”
Campus Crusade Director, John Biddle described the 70 WCU students attitudes while on the trip stating, “I was encouraged by our students’ attitudes. We had to deal with some harsh conditions, sudden changes in plans and some hard, disgusting work. The difficult stuff just rolled right off them. It seemed like nothing could steal their joy and willingness to serve others. It was inspiring.”
All together, the work that WCU students did to gut around 15 homes in New Orleans is estimated at around $2,500 per home. In total, students were able to donate around $37,000 worth of labor to the people of New Orleans. However, as Biddle described, “I think the biggest needs we met weren’t physical. The residents we met needed encouragement, some felt overwhelmed and overlooked. To say to them ‘You are not forgotten – God cares, our group cares, and I care – probably meant more than anything else. We were the face of hope to them. That was a great feeling.”
Indeed, hope is something that the residents of New Orleans have. There is a sense of courage that radiates in the faces there. The people of New Orleans know that they have survived an incredible storm in our nation’s history. Many would tell their story about all they had been through and all they had lost and then say how none of their possessions really mattered that much. What did matter were their lives and moving on, and for the work that WCU students and others were doing over spring break, they were grateful.