Mission to New Orleans
By Alison Miller, ’08
Lawrence Today magazine, Summer 2006
Traditionally, Spring Break has been a time for college students to head south
to the ocean, soak up the sun, and enjoy free time on the beach. This year,
I had another plan: I was heading south, I was going to soak up some sun, but
there would be no free time on the beach. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity
to organize a trip that took 40 Lawrence students to work in a disaster-relief
camp in New Orleans, the Made with Love Café and Grill, which is part
of Emergency Communities, a non-profit organization that helps organize volunteer
efforts in New Orleans.
The camp is home to around 200 volunteers from across the country and is currently
serving residents of the Parish of St. Bernard some 2,000 free, home-cooked
meals a day. It also holds community meetings and gives residents a clean place
to meet and find the resources they need to continue cleaning up after Hurricane
Katrina.
Spring Break was my second chance to help with relief efforts in New Orleans.
I was also there during Christmas Break 2005, and I got hooked. It is hard
work, but constantly rewarding. It is comforting to see someone smile, and
it is wonderful to hear survivors laugh as they tell “funny” stories
about what happened. These people lost everything, they lost all material possessions,
and they lost the places they called home — and, as time goes on, some
are starting to lose hope. Our group was able to lend a helping hand, and,
in the process, we heard some amazing stories, saw some unbelievable things,
and learned from the experience.
Lawrence students helped make and serve over 10,000 meals. They helped gut
five different houses and distributed countless amounts of bottled water and
clothing. I am so proud of how hard they worked and how well they represented
Lawrence.
When 'gut' is a verb and 'hope' is a noun
By Cory Robertson, ’07
As we made our way across the Emergency Communities campground, sleeping bags
and tents in tow, we were greeted by smiling faces and warm expressions of
thanks — and we hadn’t even done anything yet.
It was then I knew that our very presence, even among so many other volunteers,
would be treasured and appreciated by this community.
One of my fellow volunteers, Tasha Quesnell-Theno, ’08, described the
Emergency Communities group as “a patchwork-type family made out of an
eclectic mix of individuals.” Members of this family hailed from near
and far, united by their compassion for the hurricane victims of New Orleans.
The result was
a community that, in the words of Maggie Waldron, ’08, is “truly
amazing.”
Camping out in a toxic wasteland is not an easy circumstance to embrace, but
the Emergency Communities volunteers made it something special. Said Quesnell-Theno, “despite
the fact that all these people were living in a place that was not permanent,
they really managed to make it seem like a home, like someplace you would always
be welcome.”
That sense of welcome is vital to the hundreds of residents who rely on the
Made with Love Café and Grill for food, water, and respite from the
struggles their lives have become. The MLC is the largest source of food in
St. Bernard Parish. Without the support it provides to Katrina survivors, many
would be unable to return to their home town.
Only a fraction of St. Bernard Parish residents have returned, and 100 percent
of homes in the Parish have been devastated by the hurricane. Of the residents
I spoke with, only a handful planned to stay in
the area.
One such person was a man called Bozo, a rotund Italian restaurateur with a
tuft of gray hair and a mild, kindly demeanor. For a period of three or four
days, many of us Lawrentians, as well as several other volunteers, headed out
to Bozo’s house to do what is called “gutting” — ripping
out floorboards, shoveling debris, and removing everything but the bare shell
of the house. In the process, we came across shoes, purses, photographs, and
countless personal possessions — all covered in the toxic soot and mold
created by the hurricane. We hauled everything into the front yard, dumping
it into a mound of waste that would remain there indefinitely. Garbage trucks
run infrequently, if at all, in St. Bernard Parish.
The government’s inability to remedy these kinds of situations is what
seemed to plague the minds of everyone in St. Bernard Parish. Piles of debris
lined the sidewalks of every residential street. One day, on
our way back from Bozo’s house, we stopped in a neighborhood that had
been shielded from a nearby body of water by just one broken levee. A quaint
red, white, and blue sailboat had washed up into the front yard of a brick
house, and dried vegetation that had once sprouted from the ground now rested
on rooftops. These kinds of accidental collisions, both material and metaphorical,
are what characterize the current state of the New Orleans area.
The random assemblages of items we saw while walking down residential streets — an
old-fashioned juke box; a flattened, dried animal; a Louisiana State University
toilet seat cover — paid testament to the profound disarray of an entire
culture. Putting these pieces back together, in whatever way we could, was
our task as Emergency Communities volunteers. What we found ourselves in the
midst of — and helping to maintain — was a painful, yet beautiful
mosaic of fragmented lives and belongings, pieced together into something new — something
built from hope, compassion, and necessity.
As a grassroots organization, the Made with Love Café and Grill runs
entirely on outside donations and volunteer work. It is literally constructed
out of the willpower of the individuals involved, and the optimism inherent
in such an endeavor is contagious. We worked hard at the camp, washing dishes,
cutting vegetables, picking up trash, and performing various other duties,
but all of those tasks were infused with a sense of joy. Soulful, exuberant
music blared from the stereos in the kitchen and the dish pit, laughter and
dance mixing in with what could have otherwise been mundane tasks. Live music
was a staple of the dining area — one day an eccentric folk trio, another
day a virtuosic brass band. Residents and volunteers alike got up from their
seats to dance to the music. On our last day there, a full dance party broke
out over lunch — something that made serving dessert much more fun than
I had anticipated.
The mission statement of Emergency Communities says that, through their unique
relief effort, “victims and volunteers recover jointly from the disaster.” This
may sound harsh, and certainly, as a volunteer, I cannot begin to compare my
own experience to the suffering undergone by victims of Hurricane Katrina.
But this sense of partnership between volunteers and residents is what makes
the Made with Love Café and Grill so effective. In the dining area,
volunteers and residents eat together, intermixed and often indistinguishable.
In fact, some individuals are both volunteers and residents.
The Made with Love Café and Grill requires no sacrifice of dignity on
the part of residents. Instead, the organization empowers all present with
a sense of equality and common ground. Despite frustration with aid agencies,
Waldron says, “people are so grateful for help, and they don’t
look down on people who haven’t been through what they’ve been
through.”
By the end of my time at the Made with Love Café and Grill, I wasn’t
quite ready to go home, even as I said goodbye to the people I’d met
and had one last meal with residents of the Parish. At dinner that night I
sat with a distraught middle-aged couple who had been working for weeks to
gut their own house, as well as the house of the woman’s mother. After
I told the man how impressed I was with New Orleans, how I’d never been
anywhere like it, I saw him wipe the corner of his eye, and though I don’t
know whether he was crying, I do know that his gesture translated into a realization
of my own emotional response.
As the man playing music that night, apparently a Randy Newman impersonator,
sang “Louisiana 1927,” the song took on a whole new depth for me.
As a sometime-Newman fan, I’d heard the song before and knew it was about
a flood, but had never thought much about it. I had certainly never been to
Louisiana. As we rode off in the bus that night, my friend Peter Gillette, ’06,
and I gleefully sang another Newman song, the richness of my experience at
the camp wrapping itself around me. I promised myself I’d keep in touch
with Emergency Communities however I could and that I’d go back again
to help if I got the chance.
My week in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, was one of the most vibrant and overwhelming
weeks of my life. To say that I made a sacrifice over Spring Break would be
a lie, because I gained more during that time than I ever could have imagined.
Fourteen students from Lawrence University Habitat for Humanity traveled to
Clemson, South Carolina, to work on home construction with Pickens County Habitat
for Humanity, where they assisted with shingling a roof and installing siding,
as well as running electrical wiring and hooking up some plumbing.
Three separate groups of Lawrentians, totaling 60 students, helped New Orleans
residents recovering from the effects of Hurricane Katrina, working under the
auspices of Emergency Communities, Habitat for Humanity,
Lutheran Disaster Response, and Lawrence’s Volunteer
and Community Service Center; and Lawrence University Catholic Youth.
Eight members of the student organization Privileged Individuals Engaged in
Community Enrichment (PIECE) taught strategies for conflict resolution to students
of Hatfield Primary and Junior High School in Mandeville, Jamaica. This was
the fifth time PIECE members from Lawrence have traveled to Jamaica to offer
this curriculum.