College Magazine

Not Your Normal Spring Break

by Kendra Branchick

St. Bernard Parish, La.--For most Americans, Hurricane Katrina happened on television. Donell Bailey and Linda More weren't so lucky. They lived through the killer storm - and later shared their experiences with 50 Gettysburg College students, staff, and faculty, who spent this past spring break doing backbreaking cleanup work in Louisiana.

Katrina hit the Gulf Coast like a hammer on Aug. 29, 2005. Two days before landfall Bailey and More had fled with friends and family to seek shelter in Texas hotel rooms. They expected to check out and head home later that week, but weeks went by, and then months. They found themselves shuttling from shelter to shelter until February, when official word came down at last: it was safe to return.

Only after arriving home did Bailey and More -- and countless others -- discover how much they had lost. Pictures, furniture, clothing, family heirlooms, priceless gifts, irreplaceable memories. Everything they had worked for, now destroyed -- yet in need of clean up. For Bailey and More, that clean up was a daunting task. Bailey is retired after working more than 40 years in a Domino sugar manufacturing plant, and he has blood clots in his legs that make it hard to get around. More works in her brother's restaurant and warehouse in downtown New Orleans, about an hour's drive to work each day - and she works six days a week, which doesn't leave much time for clean up. Bailey and More didn't know each other, but 33 Gettysburg students and 17 staff and faculty members got to know both of them and dozens of other disaster victims during a grueling week of hauling water-logged mattresses, broken televisions, smashed furniture, and countless ruined and reeking items from homes ravaged by flooding and mold.

Not your normal spring break
The journey to New Orleans was definitely not a conventional spring break, but everyone who participated agreed that it was a great one. Some might wonder why students would spend spring break this way, but for Terri Lewis-King '09 the answer was obvious.

When Hurricane Katrina first hit the Gulf Coast, I didn't know a lot about what was going on," Lewis-King said. "But a few days later I picked up a newspaper and started to read more about it. When the College's service-learning trip came along to help out in New Orleans, I just knew I had to come down here and do my part."The Gettysburg College trip to New Orleans was part of a national effort, which saw students from hundreds of colleges and universities travel down to the Gulf to aid in the cleanup. But this service trip over spring break for Gettysburg students wasn't a "one-time thing." For several years Gettysburg, through the Center for Public Service, has offered alternatives to the typical spring break.

"We really feel that it's important for students to have different possibilities available during spring break," said Gretchen Natter, director of the Center for Public Service. "We've sent students to Nicaragua to help with grassroots community development projects like school construction and others to Washington, D.C. to work with the homeless. When Katrina struck, we couldn't ignore an opportunity to create a trip that would focus on helping people from a city that was completely devastated." The service-learning trip to New Orleans was announced in January, and the response was more than Natter expected. "We had to create a waiting list," she said. "There were so many students interested, as well as employees at the College." To help make it possible for volunteers to go to New Orleans, the College announced last fall that it would give faculty and staff 10 days of paid leave to participate in efforts to aid Gulf victims.

A long bus ride and a gutted-out church
Luxury wasn't an option on this spring break trip. Students and staff roughed it from the beginning - starting with a 22-hour bus ride from Gettysburg to Louisiana. To pass the time, the group watched DVDs, slept, and wondered what conditions would be like. They soon found out.

As they neared New Orleans, it looked as if the storm had hit just days ago instead of months before. Traffic lights hung crooked and dark, making it dangerous to pass through intersections. Businesses were closed, with no sign that they might reopen any time soon. Abandoned vehicles cluttered the median strips and shoulders of the roads. Everywhere an eerie quiet filled the air. No children playing in their backyards. No dogs barking or birds chirping. No people walking around, chatting with their neighbors. Only a few cars and trucks on the roads. "When we first saw the devastation from the storm, I was in shock," Emily Simmons '09 said. "I was thinking, ¿We'll get to leave here in a week, but for these people, this is their lives. They'll have to work hard for years to get their lives back in order. This isn't our everyday life. I wish others would volunteer to come down. I wish we could stay longer.'"

"I was surprised at the magnitude of the disaster," Mark Leno '08 said. "It's one thing to see the reports on TV, but to come down here - the magnitude of the disaster is different than what I had conceived. It's much more than houses or buildings, like most of the images you see. Forests are damaged. Levees are broken. It is amazing looking at the big picture and seeing just how much damage there is and how long it is going to take to repair." When the bus reached New Orleans and traveled to the neighboring community of St. Bernard Parish where the group was going to work, they saw thousands of homes, reduced to nothing more than piles of sticks. Cars and trucks, flipped over and wedged under trailers, remained where the storm had left them. The only visible evidence that anyone had visited the area since Katrina hit was brightly colored "Xs" with numbers around them, sprayed on the front of all buildings still standing to indicate when the home had been checked and the number of people found dead inside.

The bus came to a stop in Violet, La. -- a part of St. Bernard Parish that is a small community made up mostly of water, about 30 minutes south of New Orleans. It was one of the areas hit hardest by Katrina. It was also home to the nonprofit organization H.O.P.E. -- Helping Other People in Every Way -- the group that Gettysburg volunteers worked with. Established in the weeks following the storm, H.O.P.E. supports volunteers traveling to Louisiana who want to help. When the College volunteers joined with H.O.P.E. in March, the organization operated out of a gutted church that had no electricity or running water and was stripped of drywall, ceilings, and carpeting. More than a hundred cots took the place of pews and filled the bare cement floor of the sanctuary from front to back. Functional toilets were located in the building next door, but the sinks drained into five-gallon buckets placed that had to be emptied by hand. Two showers stalls were located on the side of the church - an improvisation consisting of blue tarps, milk crates, rope, and garden hoses.

Breakfast and lunch were prepared in a kitchen set up beneath an awning. A gas-powered generator provided electricity for the stoves. Most meals consisted of canned goods and bulk food that was donated. A tented area in the corner of the church parking lot served as a distribution center for H.O.P.E., where people from the community could take clothes, food, toiletries, and other donated items. Another corner served as the cleaning, drying, and storing area for the countless tools and supplies used by the volunteers - shovels, picks, goggles, gloves, trash cans, masks, hammers, boots. Behind the church, a volleyball net made of orange construction fencing was strung up for some friendly competition.

Hard work, physically and emotionally
Instead of spring break beach wear, each morning volunteers donned Tyvek suits -- white, long-sleeved units with a hood that became unbearably hot and sticky as the day wore on. They also put on respirator masks with replaceable filters, safety goggles, boots with rubber covers, and gloves. Volunteers had to be covered from head to toe to protect themselves from the many health hazards they faced while gutting the houses - mold, dust, debris, stagnant water, snakes, rats, raw sewage, spoiled food, and more.

After suiting up, volunteers loaded buses with their tools and traveled to homes around Violet. The volunteers were divided into five work groups of ten people, and were dropped off at houses that needed to be cleaned out and gutted. Sometimes groups worked within the same block; other times they were several miles apart. Arriving at the homes and seeing the devastation and the amount of work that needed to be done was one of the toughest parts of the day. "At first you're just overwhelmed," Caleb Seufert '06 said. "Then you become numb to it. And then the next day you're overwhelmed again. Only after a few days do you start to see the possibilities and the potential of the impact you're making."

Imagine a single-family home with all possessions inside tossed everywhere. Living rooms were filled with broken televisions, moldy carpets, wrecked end tables, stained curtains, armoires filled with broken dishes, ruined computers. In the kitchens, knocked-over refrigerators leaked smells of spoiled food and cupboards were filled with rodents and insects. Tucked away in the bedrooms and bathrooms were waterlogged mattresses, soiled linens, broken toilets, closets full of damp clothing, and damaged dressers. All walls and ceilings were crawling with black and brown and green mold, a different pattern in every room. Mold spores, floating in the air almost in defiance of gravity, stung the nose through the mask and made the entire house look as if it had been picked up and shaken like a snow globe. Volunteers took it one room at a time. Working together, they carried belongings out of homes and placed them in large piles in the front yards for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to pick up. They tore down mold-infested drywall and pulled out nails from house frames. They ripped out carpeting, vinyl, tile, toilets, sinks, ceiling fans, and doors. They swept up dirt and debris. Once a house was cleaned up, gutted, and dried, a bleach solution was applied to kill any remaining mold spores or germs. The work was hard, monotonous, and physically draining. It was also emotionally exhausting. Volunteers found dead cats and dogs, as well as ruined wedding dresses, photo albums, and broken medals and trophies.

Breaks during the day were few, and finding a restroom to use was difficult. The bus driver, who remained with the group during the week, drove from house to house throughout the day so that the volunteers could use the on-board bathroom. They did break for lunch, which included a donated boxed lunch from the Red Cross, consisting of rice, beans, chicken, beef, and salad. Thinking about the experience, Cody Georgia '07 remarked, "Last year I lost my camera with over 200 pictures in it from a vacation. I was upset for weeks. I realize now that I need to be grateful for the small things that I enjoy everyday. I can't even imagine losing everything - your belongings, friends, family."

Human connections
In the end, all agreed that the hard work was well worth it. Helping others does provide a sense of satisfaction. But for the volunteers, the real reward came from the connections they made to other people.

Often, owners of the homes where the volunteers worked were living in nearby trailers. Some cleaned alongside the volunteers, though others were too upset to watch the final destruction of their homes. On the day that volunteers worked on Bailey's home, he set out a picnic of drinks and snacks as a "thank you." At the end of other workdays, volunteers left the homes tired and exhausted -- but the stories of those living there went with them. "Her name was Wyonna Balouso, and she lost her craft shop, tools, supplies, house, everything," said Paul Miller, who works in the College's instructional technology department. "I will wonder in the years to come how she made out rebuilding."

Emily Simmons had similar thoughts. "At the end of the day we showed the husband and wife the empty house and it was really sad," she said. "They told us that they weren't going to rebuild until after this hurricane season passed because they don't know what to expect." For Evan Conley '07 one small detail in particular struck him. "One day we were breaking down the walls inside this house and I noticed the wall had tick marks representing their children's height from the past 12 years," he said. "I couldn't hit the wall from the front side because those marks made me realize that this was more than just a wall."

For Tracie Desjardins '09, there was the considerable satisfaction of knowing that she had made a difference in another person's life. "I'll never forget this man's face at the end of the day when we were done working," she said. "It had taken him three days to empty one room, and we finished the entire house in one day. The fact that we did so much in one day was an awesome feeling."

The College volunteers left Louisiana after a week of work and returned to Gettysburg, grateful for the opportunity to help others. In turn, people like Donell Bailey and Linda More acknowledged their appreciation for the time, hard work, and compassion given by the volunteers. "I think it was so nice of them; it's so beautiful," More said. "They have to know how much they are helping people. I had nobody." Bailey wholeheartedly agreed, saying: "They are so wonderful. These are wonderful people. They came down to help. They don't even have to do this; they're college students. They're helping me out so much. I love y'all."

Tending to the ill

While others worked cleaning out houses, Cody Georgia '07 spent part of her week in Louisiana volunteering at a health clinic in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans - one of the areas hardest hit by Katrina. The clinic itself, a small white structure, was little more than a gutted house, with no electricity or running water.

An interdisciplinary studies major in health, health promotions, and physical education, Georgia helped with documentation and pre-treatment analysis. "I'm trained in CPR and first aid, so I was able to help with taking blood pressure, temperature, and things like that," Georgia said. "Most of the work at the clinic was being done by one person who has been there since September." Georgia spoke with patients who had no health insurance, but faced health problems such as respiratory conditions, anxiety attacks, and exhaustion as a result of the hurricane. Her view from the clinic was row upon row of devastated homes.

For Georgia, the experience in New Orleans was one that has helped prepare her for a future in health care. "I've had the chance to learn about a natural disaster and the health issues that surround it," she said. "And I got to see how those health issues relate to social, economical, and race concerns. It's real life and I experienced it firsthand. This wasn't something that you can pick up in a textbook."