Hard work in Big Easy for spring break
NEW ORLEANS (AP) - March 21, 2008 Hundreds of students from across the nation are streaming into
New Orleans this spring break to lend their time and an air of hope
to a city where years of repair work remain.
One after another, students said they've come because they
haven't forgotten about New Orleans and how 80 percent of the city
was flooded when the levees broke during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
"The 20-somethings - we're a lot more aware politically,
socially, culturally," said Melissa Licastro, a New Jersey
architecture student helping out Friday in the funky but
flood-wrecked Lower 9th Ward neighborhood of Holy Cross. Clad in a
T-shirt and blue work trousers, she pulled crooked and blackened
nails from old cypress planks, just a few blocks from Fats Domino's
house.
She paused, hammer in hand. "I don't think the older generation
gives us enough credit."
Licastro, who attends the New Jersey Institute of Technology,
joined ranks with about 500 other students from Ivy League colleges
and big state campuses on an all-out "spring greening" campaign
to make the hard-hit Lower 9th more energy efficient and green, or,
as activists want, "the nation's first zero carbon community."
Over the past week, students painted houses in bright pastels
with nontoxic paint, salvaged historic homes undergoing
deconstruction, painted fences and cleaned up a bayou.
Although the Lower 9th largely remains a landscape of despair
and neglect, many streets, especially in the Holy Cross
neighborhood, are bouncing back: There are porches lined with
plants, a few churches have reopened, people stroll the streets -
and there's now a restaurant.
For the students, coming to New Orleans is no easy street. They
have to pay their own airfare, sleep in dormitories and get little
time for Bourbon Street fun.
And once here, they're immediately put to work by charities and
community groups that have spent months preparing for the influx of
free labor.
Avi Edelman, a film student at Columbia University in New York,
shrugged off the cost. "People pay that much to go to Miami for
their spring break."
Kaley Hanenkrat, also from Columbia and studying Russian and
political science, chipped in with the obvious sequitur: "It's
better to spend your time helping someone than getting drunk
somewhere."
Edelman and Hanenkrat helped restore a rambling wooden
playground next to the Mississippi River threatened with rot
because it was so badly flooded.
The wave of students brought a bounce in mood to this struggling
corner of the city, and, inescapably, a bit of spring break
frivolity, with the occasional water fight breaking out.
They got a hero's welcome from residents.
"It's a godsend," said Deloris Wells, a 67-year-old retiree
whose home on Dauphine Street was badly flooded - Katrina's water
left "the love seat on the coffee table."
"A nice bunch of kids," she said, so grateful for the gang of
T-shirt-and-sneaker clad students on ladders lending her shotgun
home a new lease on life with a pale yellow coat of paint.
In many ways, volunteers - students, church groups, senior
citizens, old house enthusiasts, community activists - have become
the backbone of New Orleans' recovery.
Said Darryl Malek-Wiley of the New Orleans chapter of the Sierra
Club: "If it weren't for volunteers, we would still be back in
2005."