Students Reflect on MALT New Orleans Trip

Author: Emily Peterson and Ilhan Kim

I'm from New Orleans - born and raised there my whole life - and I felt heartbroken, confused, angry and helpless after Katrina. I was actually at school already when Katrina made landfall, but my immediate reaction was to pack my bags and head down to the city right away. Obviously this wasn't realistic, but it was agonizing for me to sit in a seat of comfort and safety thousands of miles away as my fellow neighbors were starved and drowning.

I had done a MALT trip to New York last year to work with an immigrant and refugee resettlement organization, so I figured that a MALT trip to New Orleans would be a perfect avenue to direct my energy and help the city. I designed the trip back in September, and once it was approved, we hit the ground running with planning, fundraising and all the organizational madness that goes into that sort of undertaking.

Our time in New Orleans was incredibly busy. We worked with an elementary school called Good Shepherd School. Good Shepherd serves students who are all below the poverty line because they believe that education is the critical piece in breaking the cycle of poverty, racism and ignorance in our society.

At the school, we led art and writing projects with the students in order to focus our attention away from the trauma of the hurricane. We did a cultural exchange centered around the differences between New Orleans and Vermont because many of these students have never seen snow, a cow or a farm before. It worked really well - we fell in love with the kids, they loved the time we spent with them, and we were all sorry when it came time to go our separate ways.

In the afternoons, we went to a neighborhood that received water damage, but will definitely be rebuilt One big issue in the rebuilding plan is whether some neighborhoods should be allowed to rebuild at all!. We worked at a community center, where our main task was to fully gut the house of an elderly man named Mr. Gerald. It took the whole week and it was quite a lot of a hard work, but we pulled it off. Mr. Gerald couldn't afford to pay contractors to gut his house and the government certainly wasn't giving him any money. Another project at this site included working on the construction of an organic garden, which will act as a community garden in the area. Our group built an impressive brick pathway.

In our "spare" time, we attended lectures on the media, the environment and culture. We also toured the city so that everyone understood the extent of the devastation. I would strongly encourage the whole student body to go to new orleans. There's still so much to do, and we have a responsibility as college students that we don't always live up to.

- Emily Peterson

While the initial shock of Hurricane Katrina may have receded in the minds of many Americans, our MAlt trip deeply impressed upon us that New Orleans and its inhabitants are still in dire need of financial and moral support.

Our experiences at the Good Shepherd School and McMain High School made it clear that the younger generation has been scarred by this tragedy as many students we worked with expressed frustration and anger at the lack of assistance their families received from FEMA and the Red Cross.

Even during our short stay, we met displaced students that had just returned from neighboring states and heard about others as they struggled to live in cramped conditions in hotel rooms and trailer houses. In the afternoons, we worked on Mr. Gerald's house in the Bayou St. John area, gutting out the sheet rock and wood panels that have been damaged by the floodwaters and the ensuing mold. While it seemed at times that our efforts were futile as there are hundreds of thousands of houses in the area that require similar treatment, it dawned upon all of us that it will take individual, small-scale efforts, such as ours, to help rebuild the city of New Orleans.