Hurricane Relief trip - the Highlights

Ok, now that I'm posting this it sounds kind of hokey - put it has a beginning, middle and end, and a theme - if you remember that from writing articles for your highschool newspaper, which I do. My post for today is an article I submitted to the Minnesota VISTA newsletter about my experience as a staff advisor on Concordia College's Hurricane Relief trip to New Orleans this past October.
Recipe of the weekend: Pumpkin pie - to be frozen for Thanksgiving. The recipe is on the can of pumpkin.


Since starting my position in August I’ve answered a lot of questions. It’s hard to know the right way to answer them. As a VISTA my position is an interesting one, since I work at a college - Concordia College in Moorhead Minnesota, but not for the college. It’s difficult to explain to people how I am on the college staff, but I’m actually a VISTA, especially since most people assume I’m a college student. “Actually I work here,” is heard a lot.

At times it’s difficult to know my role in the college setting. I want to go to meetings for student organizations and be involved, but how much should I participate? They’re not my organizations because I’m not a student anymore. So when I first heard about an interest meeting for a Hurricane Relief trip to the gulf coast over fall break, I was interested but reminded myself that this was an opportunity for college students – I am after all, already committed to service here.

But I went to the interest meeting anyway, because I was interested and somehow couldn’t let it go by. Afterwards I visited the campus pastor and told him if there was a need for college staff, I would be happy to make the trip fit into my schedule if my supervisor agreed, even though it meant incurring a little extra expense (no small deal for a VISTA, as we all know.) He responded that there was a great need college staff to go on the trip as advisors.

As advisors, we would be the adult resources for the student leaders, representing the college staff and administration. Each team of two student leaders was responsible for approximately 12 students. In total 158 students were divided among the three sites; Kenner, Louisiana, Mandeville, Louisiana, and Ocean Springs, Mississippi. 28 student leaders were in charge of 14 work groups, and I was one of 9 faculty/staff advisors.

Student leaders motivated and organized their teams, and were responsible for morning devotions and guiding evening reflections, or “debriefing” sessions after each days work. I wasn’t sure I was any more qualified than a student leader, and probably less qualified than some, when I agreed to go but the experience would be worth while.

Kenner, Louisiana is about 20 minutes outside of the city of New Orleans. There we were staying with families hosting us through two different Lutheran Churches. Hurricane Katrina put Kenner in an interesting situation. The only reason Kenner flooded was because city managers evacuated pump operators that could have prevented the overflow of canals. My host “father” experienced some damage to his home, but in his own words it was “nothing compared to what other people have lost.”

We went into the city of New Orleans the first day and cleaned up a churchyard. We started by picking up litter and debris, but eventually we were hauling tree branches and raking the yard. Then we moved on to a house on Emerald Street that was being totally gutted. The student crew that started the day there began by hauling out the furniture that had been underwater, and by the mid afternoon we were tearing up floorboards and hauling out sheetrock and insulation.

You can never really take in such devastation until you see it right in front of you. A water line on the front of every house on a block; a child’s jungle gym dangling on the side of a fence; in the midst of a pile of the entire contents of a home, covered with moldy sheetrock, insulation, and stray boards – a huge flat screened TV, and all the cars everywhere covered in the layer of white dust that tells you this car was once completely underwater.

And even when you see it, it’s hard remind yourself you’re in the same country you were in when you boarded that bus in Minnesota. A storm did this.

I spent only a few hours the end of one afternoon in a house on Pratt Drive in New Orleans – a neighborhood I can never forget. This area is called Lakeview. Eight houses down from the home we were working in is where the levy broke right in the backyard. In this stage of the recovery in New Orleans if a house doesn’t have a huge pile of its sodden contents in the street in front of the house, you can guess the owners haven’t been back yet. The house we were working in was the only one I could see with a garbage pile.

My favorite thing I got to do happened on the last work day. We finished the work at our first site early and went to a second house where the owner wasn’t expecting us for another hour. It became snack time while across the street a group of men were hauling cinder blocks out of the backyard. I went and asked them if they needed help. The man in charge of the project was very surprised and grateful to hear we had come from Minnesota. He was from Texas, himself and the home he was working on belonged to his father in law. Four feet of water had flooded the house, and the man was trying to repair the damage himself so they could sell it. He was very appreciative of a stranger’s offer to help and the first thing he asked me was “did the Lord send you?”

As a VISTA you don’t get many opportunities to roll up your sleeves and do physical labor. Our style of service is indirect. Normally, I spend most days behind a desk sending emails and coordinating an after school program which creates mentoring partnerships between Concordia College students and area middle school students.

I wasn’t sure how this was going to work when I said I’d be a staff advisor, responsible for helping train the student leaders and helping facilitate the debriefing sessions. Would I be able to contribute something meaningful? Or would I just start babbling in the debriefing session thinking what I had to say was insightful?

In the end it didn’t matter what I said in session. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t part of any one work group. It didn’t matter that I was a staff member and not a college student. What mattered was I was there, among some of the most mature, hardworking students I ever met, sharing in an experience. I know some of the students who joined this trip to serve wouldn’t argue with me that we were just as served by the people we had come to help.

As a VISTA I spend some time answering questions, but sometimes questions are best left unanswered. Sometimes the line between Americorps and Concordia doesn’t need to be defined. And as I learned in New Orleans, sometimes my experience will be serving through Americorps and sometimes it will be serving through Concordia. The thing that matters most is the service, and that’s the most important part to get right.

To view a 3 part news piece on Concordia's Hurricane Relief trip, click on this link. It should be cool. I haven't seen it yet.
http://www.cord.edu/about/katrina.php