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Thirty-three East Los Angeles College students traveled to New Orleans during spring break to volunteer and help the city with the massive clean-up it still faces today more than eight months after Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf region. The students are pictured here outside the elementary school where they slept on cots and air mattresses for a week.

 

     Alejandra Cruz remembers how quiet it got as the bus from the airport approached the Ninth Ward, the hurricane-ravaged area of New Orleans that remains, if barely, eight months after Katrina ripped through the Gulf region.

     It was a moment that Cruz and her fellow East Los Angeles College students will never forget.

“I’m like wow! I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” she said. “It was like watching a movie and not something you would actually experience.”

Cruz was one of 33 ELAC students that were about to spend spring break help with the massive cleanup. What they didn’t know was just how much destruction had taken place and how much still remained to clean up.

     Paul Medina, who caught many of the images on his camera, described an eerie scene.

“The city was like a ghost town,” he said. “There were rows and rows of damaged houses and buildings, poles with no power lines attached to them and pitch dark at night. There were no people.”

      As if they needed more, the scenes only served as more motivation to the group of ELAC students that went to work with Common Ground, a community-initiated volunteer organization that provides short-term relief for victims of hurricane disasters in the Gulf Coast region, and long-term support in rebuilding the communities affected in the New Orleans area.

     Students Tasha Ferrell and Tiel Rainelli came up with the idea of getting a group of students together to fly to New Orleans to help with the cleanup.  They asked Dr. Anthony Samad, an ELAC professor of political science, to help with the arrangements. The hope was to get at least 10 students to volunteer. They wound up with the 33.

     The students received more than $17,500 in funding from the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees to help with expenses. They also raised another $2,000 on their own.

     Medina said that students could have spent spring break partying on the beach in the Mexican town of Rosarito like so many other college students. But they spent an entire week in New Orleans instead, where they were quartered in what had been a Catholic elementary school, St. Mary of the Angels, in the Upper Ninth Ward. The students slept on cots and air mattresses. They showered daily without hot water after working eight to nine hours a day gutting houses that were contaminated with asbestos. A diesel engine generator provided the electricity.

     Juan Villalobos was assigned to a group of ELAC students that had the task of gutting a house of furnishings that were covered with mold and described the work as overwhelming.

     “Not physically, but emotionally,” he said. “Just having to be at a place where people had suffered and struggled to escape made it really tough emotionally,” he said.

     Dr. Rin Kahla, an ELAC professor of sociology who accompanied the students on the trip, said the experience gave new meaning to the word devastation.

     “I don’t think you can actually explain what it feels like to go onto a street and be able to put your hand on a roof when it’s in the middle of the street,” she said. “I’ll never use the word devastation again, the same way not after what we saw,” she added. “I think our experience really gave new meaning to the word.”

     While the destruction and the Southern culture may have left a lasting impression on them, the 33 ELAC students left an impression on the folks of New Orleans and Common Ground officials.

     “They were saying that this was the most incredible group they had, the most hard-working group they had, that they had not seen this kind of work from a group in a long time, and if we could please stay longer,” Dr. Kahla said. “It was all positive.”

     Ferrell said that on the final night of the trip she spoke with the owner of one of the homes that ELAC helped clean up while sitting in the Café Dumont in the French Quarter.

     “He lost everything to the hurricane, yet what was interesting is that he said that even though there were thousands of houses, we helped his family with that house that meant the world to them,” she said. “That made me feel that what I did really had an affect on the world, my world, in a positive way.”

     The goal now is to keep the group from ELAC together and Ferrell would like to see the group use the ideals of Common Ground to help address the issues facing the communities around ELAC. The students are putting together a documentary using video footage that Dr. Kahla filmed and images that they captured with their cameras.

     To and Medina said that there’s a lot of work that still remains to be done in New Orleans, however.

     “We’re planning to go back in January,” Medina said. “Want to join us?”

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