Next Stop- Louisiana!
By Pegah Rashti
In the last three years of attending SDSU, my life has consisted of partying, studying and working each day (not in that particular order), but its nothing I’m really proud of. Consequently, I began to crave opportunities to not only take better advantage of my days left in college, but to travel and experience a life different than my own. But it became even more specific than that. I found that my greatest desire was to make a difference in someone else’s life.
And that’s when I heard of College Students for New Orleans!
After weekly meetings and preparation, fifty SDSU students and I started our trip just right by raising over $6,000 during an Art Relief. With that, we headed to Louisiana on Friday, March 27th to spend our spring break building homes for those who lost everything from Hurricane Katrina.
“Wow really? Is it still bad over there?” people ask me when I told them where I was going. Yes, it is. I’m not sure I even knew what to expect, but I had learned enough to know that our government was no longer helping Katrina victims, and the media had forgotten about them too.
Friday night, we arrived at Camp Hope in the St. Bernard Parish, with low expectations but an open mind. The camp is located at a school that was damaged by the hurricane, but renovated to house hundreds of people who are there to help. Classrooms were transformed into bedrooms and filled with bunk beds. There was a mini gym, conference room and even a computer lap. It didn’t take us long to hate the showers; signs reading “4 minute showers” were posted all along the walls, reminding us to spend one minute to soap up, one minute to shampoo, one minute to condition and one minute to rinse. Hot water was limited.
Since we arrived on a Friday, we spent the next day exploring New Orleans by going to Uptown and the French Quarter. It was apparent that the state spent more money rebuilding the upscale and wealthy areas, for it consisted of beautiful coffee shops, monuments, buildings and restaurants. We even got a taste of the culture by eating crawfish like the locals! It was a privilege to experience the culture and lifestyle of such a historical town and be welcomed by all the New Orleanians.
However on our way to site-seeing, the three vans full of 15 people were not as loud and excited as when we first piled in. We were silent. The images we saw outside of our windows sent chills down my spine. The city looked dead. You could see piles of wood replacing a home, a random boat where a car should be, empty land that once consisted of trees and neighborhoods. Trailer homes were scattered, and some people were in the process of building their houses which were lifted 10 ft. in the air! A few homes had big “Xs” spray painted on the walls and we learned that the bottom number meant how many people had died there. Other houses had “No trespassing, you will be shot!” written on the walls. This was because numerous times officials have simply shown up and destroyed someone’s home, without permission.
After observing the city firsthand, we were even more inspired to help and definitely ready to work. The St. Bernard Project is a non-profit, community based organization that we were working through, whose mission is to make it easier for families to move back into their homes. Monday morning we were split into groups and sent off to different houses that were at different stages in reconstruction. I quickly realized that being in shape was a great advantage to working on a home! It was clear that this would be a challenge, and at my group’s house, we were responsible for dry walling and mudding. Now it’s hard to understand how difficult this was, unless you’ve already done it. But let’s put it this way, never in my life have my arms been as toned as they are now! We spent hours each day for the rest of the week, putting up the walls to the entire house. This involved measuring, cutting, lifting and screw driving heavy dry walls into the framework. And it’s not easy when you’re a rookie. But it turns out we were well ahead of schedule and could even begin mudding; which is filling each crack between the dry walls with some kind of mud-form substance. Within the week we built trust in one another, team work and dependency to get the job done. By the end of the week we had renovated the framework of a house into a beautiful home.
We also had the advantage of meeting our homeowner and to hear her story about life after Katrina. It brought tears to our eyes to imagine the pain and fear she’s been through with her sons. She told us of the lengthy process that homeowners are required to go through to get permits to rebuild their houses. It would cost them hundreds of dollars to fix the roof, windows or even doors. It hurt to know that our government is not helping, FEMA is taking away their trailer homes, and they expect families to pay abundant amounts of money when they really have nothing. It’s as if they don’t want Louisianans to return home.
I am filled with emotion to meet the individuals who were affected by the hurricane and to see with my own eyes the streets that are, after four years, still in destruction. But I was motivated to make a difference. We all were. It was straining both mentally and physically- but the pain in my arms and my legs were nothing to complain about. I still keep in touch with the individuals from our group and we all plan to do it again soon! I hope that more people can take part in not only this trip, but anything that will benefit someone in need. Though we are all of different colors, races, religions and backgrounds, we live in one world and we are one family. Help each other. I know I will.
For more information on the program and how to sign up, visit http://studentsvolunteer.googlepages.com.
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Last update: 7/7/09
