The Rocket

Issue date: 1/27/06 Section: News

Media Credit: SUBMITTED PHOTO Heather Lougee Stoy, a 2005 SRU graduate, and Josh Nard, a current SRU student, cut tree limbs in New Orleans over winter break.

While most students spent their winter break visiting with family and relaxing, a group of 11 Slippery Rock University students, along with an alumnus, adviser, and a few community members, spent a week lending a helping hand to the New Orleans community.

On Jan. 3 the group departed for New Orleans for a Care Break session. The group stayed near Tulane and Loyola University.

"New Orleans is a ghost town," said Colleen Cooke, the Care Break faculty adviser of the trip. "The surface has not even been scratched."

An estimated 6.5 billion dollars has been spent on the relief efforts to help the city of New Orleans. Cooke said New Orleans set up mobile homes so that when the residents returned they would have somewhere sanitary to stay while they rebuild their homes.

"They have all of these trailers down there, ready for people to live in, and yet no one can move in because the government is refusing to pay for mobile homes," Cooke said.

However, she said there is a part of town that is surrounded by a barbed wire fence for the federal government workers to eat. Cooke said that there was a big sign hanging by the fences saying no admittance without government identification.

"How can the federal government feed its employees with catered meals and not feed the victims of Hurricane Katrina?" Cooke said.

Cooke said the only relief effort that was down in New Orleans during the time that the Care Break volunteers were there was the Salvation Army and the Red Cross.

"Even though there were hundreds of volunteers who took time off from their jobs and dropped everything in their life to help in the relief effort, there was absolutely no sign of the federal government except in the area with a fence around it," Cooke said.

The group spent the majority of their time cleaning out shambled homes.

"We had to wear latex gloves, workman's gloves, work boots, and medical masks while we were cleaning these homes," Cooke said. "Everyone had their own personal bottle of hand sanitizer too."

Cooke said the group's main goal was to clean out the homes by removing the molded furniture, the corroded dry wall, and any belongings that were touched by the floodwaters,

The students used massive amounts of Clorox bleach to help disinfect and remove the mold from the homes as well as to clean what they could.

Each day there, the Care Break volunteers worked on a separate house or area. Cooke said it was difficult for the group to leave the houses unfinished.

"They made good progress but the houses were no where near livable," Cooke said.

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