One year after their classmates spent an emotional week in New Orleans helping victims of Hurricane Katrina, a second group of Union College students has traveled to New Orleans for a week during their winter break to help build homes for displaced musicians.
The 22 students are working with Habitat for Humanity and staying at a renovated elementary school called Camp Hope in St. Bernard Parish. They are helping to build a Musicians' Village in the devastated Upper 9th Ward. It's a project of modest houses conceived by the New Orleans musicians Harry Connick Jr. and Branford Marsalis.
Today, the Times Union on its Web site, http://timesunion.com, will begin publishing a daily journal by the students. It will appear through Sunday.
Last year, the students gutted homes that had been flooded, befriended residents who had lost all their possessions, slept on floors in cold houses, cooked their own meals and gained insight into their own lives. They learned that their concerns and problems were minuscule compared to people whose lives had been devastated by wind and floods.
The students pledged to make such a trip a regular part of winter break, which runs from Thanksgiving through December. Janet Grigsby, a sociology professor at Union in Schenectady who is accompanying the students, said that this year 60 students applied for the 22 openings. Among the students in New Orleans are two who made the trip last year, Libby Johnson and Meagan Keenan.
The trip is being funded largely by a donation from an alumni of the college. The students also raised money, and the parents of one student donated gloves, goggles, masks and other supplies.
“The situation down there is so overwhelming, even a year-plus after Katrina, that I think it's going to be equally as emotional as it was last year,” said Grigsby on the eve of the journey. “At this point we're all eager to get down there and help.”