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Carole Mikita ReportingTheir school gave them options of interesting places to travel this spring; group of juniors from Rowland Hall-St. Mark's chose New Orleans. They hoped to help people.
These young people say they had such an overwhelming sense of helplessness watching television reports about the devastation from Hurricane Katrina, they wanted to see it for themselves.
Lena Carroll, Rowland Hall-St. Mark's student volunteer: "I wanted to go in and really be able to help a family. That was important to me."
Thirteen students and two faculty members from Rowland Hall-St. Mark's recently spent six days working in a New Orleans suburb. What they saw shocked them.
Victoria Heagy, Rowland Hall-St. Mark's student volunteer: "You see people living in trailers in their front yards, boats in the roads and abandoned cars underneath the overpasses. It's kind of like, unimaginable."
Their assignment was to clean out a house. Since the neighborhood had been under 12 feet of water for three weeks, they had to wear protective clothing.
Morgan Zimmerman: "If you took off your mask, you couldn't really breathe in that house, in reality. And the suits, which were really hot, helped a lot, since if you looked around, how bad of a situation it was."
Phillip Stevens: "The fridge and stuff that had water still inside of it and stuff like that, it was kind of nasty, yeah."
They stripped a four-bedroom house down to the boards, creating three huge piles of rubble and saving very little.
Jerica Johnson: "You would think that they'd have more done, nine months later. But it's crazy how much still needs to be done. It's gonna be years and years down the road before there's real recovery."
They wrote in their journals about an experience that changed them.
Ryan Hoglund: "That was the thing, I think, that moved me the most. It was just the kindness of others that were helping people get through."
Ariana Barusch: "When you get back to your house, you realize there's just an illusion of safety you have there and it's not really enough to protect you, when you look back at these people who lost everything."
Tomorrow, hurricane season officially begins. The students and their teachers say volunteer community and church groups are still doing all of the clean-up work. If your group would like some advice on how to help, visit Rowland Hall-St. Mark's web site at www.rhsm.org.
