I returned home, selfishly craving the luxuries of my bed, my moms cooking and the company of my family during the holidays. During the final days in Dulac all I wanted was to go home because I felt so useless and alone sometimes and now that I am home I wish I could be more proactive and I almost miss the constant opportunities to help people. As an update I have been in contact with Nat Turner about applying for Extreme Home Makeover and I have written a letter to someone else rather important that I feel could make a significant difference in his life. He really was inspiration to me.
After being home for a week, I must say that it has been especially difficult summing up this trip into a presentable explanation quick enough for the short conversations I have had with everyone I’ve run into since being home. Even though it isn’t appropriate for short passing-by talk, I really want to let everyone know what it was like. I also must say that it has been extremely hard to convey how exactly I feel about the trip to people. When my friends ask about it they expect that it was more recreational in nature and so they don’t understand why I don’t exclaim about how much “fun” it was. How I feel about the trip is way more complex than just an adjective for fun, because it wasn’t all fun, and it wasn’t supposed to be. It was real. We were getting involved in real situations that real people are facing on a daily basis and the disappointment, the poverty and the amount still needing to be fixed is real. And in the end, we had to walk away from these real people, barely scratching the surface of what needs to be done for them and everyone living that way. It is such a contrast to our daily-pampered college student lives, where “the real world” is still in the distance, after college.

It’s been more than a week in Louisiana and we have just moved on from city life in New Orleans to what seems to be the middle of nowhere known as Dulac. Before this drastic transition between such contrasting places, I learned a lot in New Orleans. I have never in my entire life felt more welcomed to a place than I felt by every single person I met here. It was fairly obvious how passionate the people here are for this place and it seems as if their main goal is to show everyone that comes here, exactly why New Orleans is so valuable. From this, I have drawn the conclusion that there is not a catastrophe devastating enough that could stop the heart of this city, and it will stay alive forever with the passion exuded by its inhabitants.
Aside from living in the constant epitome of southern hospitality, I also learned so much about the institutions and organizations that I thought were implemented for our protection but instead are fraudulent and plagued with scandal and deceit. I am less eager to trust government institutions like the FDA who blatantly ignore and provide cover-ups to the obvious dangers of dispersants and the oil spill just to see the numbers they want on their paychecks. I am less willing to support a criminal justice program filled with dirty cops out with racist attempts to fill the jails in New Orleans and take advantage of people ignorant to their rights as citizens. Its just amazing to me to see the extent people will go to amass wealth, even if that involves neglecting their actual occupational purpose which results in mistreatment of the citizens the institutions were ironically set in place to protect.
The day at Our School At Blair Grocery (www.ourschoolatblairgrocery.org) was the most inspirational day on this trip thus far. Nat Turner lives without walls or electricity and has often times found himself living off of bags of coins and teaching out of his only possession; a school bus. He teaches kids from his neighborhood that have been brought up in environments not optimal for high success rates, fraudulent with drugs and crime. Regardless of the fact that the visible success that he has with these children is a slow process that often contains multiple set backs and disappointment, he has devoted his entire life and intelligence to making his world a better place, slowly but surely. That to me is volunteerism at its highest form, because he has committed every ounce of his energy to his passion of helping the children around him that wouldn’t have a chance at success without his attention. It was just so inspiring to meet a man that has invested everything he has into seeing the change that he wishes to see. He mentioned that only one of us would walk away and actually do something with the knowledge and tools he shared with us. I want to be that one person and I have made a promise to myself not to let him down, because he deserves the best and I would love for him to be the start of a chain reaction of passionate good deeds that I too will pass on. Thanks to Nat Turners immaculate perspective and level of articulacy, I am motivated now more than ever before to give everything I have to change the world, and I promise that I will make it happen, just wait….

Union College is located about 25 minutes from the house that I grew up in and 15 minutes from the high school that I went to. When I came to Union my radius of experience outside of my hometown only grew by a few miles, while to many students Union is their home away from home. My entire life I have been confined to this small section of Upstate New York and have only traveled out of its limits on infrequent occasions so I am most excited to get out of here an immerse myself in a new culture. One of my biggest, yet least explored passion is that for travelling to places where I can experience living situations not as ideal as my own. Through this I want to gain awareness for the destituteness that plagues populations everywhere, but from which I have been shielded because my perspective has never been relocated. With this awareness I feel that I will no longer take for granted all of the luxuries that I dismiss as common amenities that people go without on a daily basis. This humanitarian excursion is the first step I will be taking towards exploring my passion and my first dabble with globalizing my perspective and the community to which I am serving.
One thing that I am particularly anxious about is actually getting to leave behind my ignorance about the actual condition of New Orleans. Because it has been hard to untangle the truth from the media about the present state of Louisiana, I think that I will not truly understand the extent to which all of these catastrophes have devastated not only the land but the social and economic constructs of New Orleans until I am living in it, which is an argument bolstered by W.E.B Dubois who implied that the only way to truly learn about and know a culture is to live in it.
I am also particularly excited about our night out on Frenchman Street listening to real New Orleans Jazz. Even though I am not a huge jazz fan, it is definitely a style of music I can appreciate especially in a place where it is such an embodiment of the culture!