Triumph of the Human Spirit: The Hurricane Katrina Mission

March, 2006 - When spring break comes to college campuses around the country, many students head south to various tropical locations for a week of fun, sun, and partying. Some opt for the hot spots in Florida—Daytona Beach, Panama City, South Beach or Key West—while others flock to locations such as South Padre Island or Cancun.

However, for 21 members of the Assumption College community, spring break 2006 was anything but a typical jaunt to paradise. Nineteen students and two staff members, Tom Clark, resident director for the office of Residential Life, and Stephanie McCaffrey, assistant director of Campus Ministry, made the 26-hour bus ride to Chalmette, LA to participate in the Hurricane Katrina Mission from March 4–10. Assumption partnered with Stonehill College and groups from both schools worked alongside each other to gut out houses that were ravaged by Katrina, one of the most destructive storms to ever hit the United States, in August 2005.

The groups worked through the National Relief Network, which enables volunteers to participate in large disaster relief efforts while providing shelter and transportation to its participants. The 43 total volunteers from Assumption and Stonehill made their temporary home at Camp Premier, a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) facility, with 1,300 other volunteers from across the country. The group completed nine houses over four days.

McCaffrey and a group of seven students who went on the trip spoke about their experience in a multi-media presentation held on March 23, 2006 in the Hagan Campus Center Hall. The highlight of the afternoon was a moving 20-minute PowerPoint presentation that chronicled the seven-day trip with vivid photos of the destruction as well as the relief efforts. Laurel Crane ’07 spent more than 20 hours putting the photo presentation together.   

The main task of the mission was clear—to completely gut out houses that the group was assigned to by Chalmette’s St. Bernard Parish. These houses first needed to be gutted before being rebuilt. The first step upon entering a house was to break all the doors and windows in order to air them out. Black mold covered walls, ceilings and floors and thick mud was caked on just about everything. The foul smell of rotting food in abandoned refrigerators and pantries permeated the thick southern air. Students were amazed how little had been done since Katrina first made landfall nearly seven months earlier. Trees were still on top of houses, cars were still in canals, and whole neighborhoods looked like they had not been touched. “It was shocking to me,” said Katie Durham ’07. “It didn’t look like much had been done. It was a lot worse than we expected.” “It doesn’t have any impact on you until you are actually there and see it up close,” added Angela Martano ’08. “It looked like time had frozen and nothing had been done.” 

The groups had to literally remove everything from inside the houses, including appliances, furniture, and debris. The items were then brought into the street where they would later be picked up. Volunteers also kept an eye out for personal valuables and other items they thought the homeowner might want to keep—items such as a wedding ring that one woman had left behind during the storm. Diana McKinnon ’07 spent two hours on her hands and knees looking for the ring and praying to St. Anthony, the Catholic patron saint of lost items. Eventually, in a large chunk of mud she found a diamond ring and an earring but was unable to tell for sure if it was in fact a wedding ring she had discovered.

In other houses, the group made more definitive discoveries. While cleaning out a room in one home, group members stumbled upon a box labeled “cremation services.” The box housed the ashes of a man’s wife who had passed away a few months before Katrina hit. “That was a very emotional moment for everyone,” said McCaffrey. In another house, a group found an original Picasso painting from 1905 that had been ruined by the hurricane.

At first, the volunteers were not sure how homeowners would react to complete strangers digging through their belongings. However, the homeowners that students came across were anything but disagreeable. During the project, the students became friendly with a couple that owned one of the houses they were gutting. In a display of unimaginable generosity at the end of the week, the couple gave the students $400 to get something to eat on their long bus ride home. “These people just lost everything they owned and they gave us $400,” said Crane. “I have more in my college dorm room than these people had in their house. It was absolutely amazing.”

Despite the destitute and ravaged landscape that volunteers saw before them, the human spirit prevailed in many places. Perhaps it was the “Got Mold?” bumper sticker on a pickup truck or the Elvis Presley doll that hung from a porch reading “Elvis has left the building.”  “The triumph of the human spirit that I observed was really inspiring to me,” said McCaffrey.

At the end of the Katrina Mission presentation, students got a chance to share their thoughts on a gift that they received through this experience. Following is a sampling of what some of the students shared:

“You really get to see the importance we put on material possessions when you have an experience like this. It’s not material possessions, it’s friends, family, and even strangers that matter,” said Colin Potter ’06.

“It was amazing to see how much we could do together. We all came together and accomplished everything. It was really fulfilling to work with every single person on the mission,” said Bill McKinnon ’07.

“We wanted to stay down there forever and gut out all the houses but we had to come home,” said Krissy DeLuca ’08.

Although this mission might have strayed from the traditional spring break plans of many college students, the lessons of service, generosity, humility, and teamwork that were gained are invaluable skills that last for an entire lifetime.

“I would rather do this every spring break than go to Cancun or Florida and come back with a sunburn and a hangover,” said Durham.

[View the Hurricane Katrina Mission Gallery of Photos]