The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
“There is still so much poverty”
On a sweltering day in early August, a group of 17 students from Crested Butte’s Union Congregational Church stopped to see two small grave markers beside the road in a rebuilt neighborhood in New Orleans’ now-famous Lower Ninth Ward.
“We were outside and this man saw us and came outside to talk to us,” Shelby Kopf, a senior at Crested Butte Community School, remembers. “He was really nice and told us to come into his house and he shared his story.”
He told the group about his mother and his granddaughters, about the hurricane and why they had stayed when everyone else was running away.
“They tried to evacuate but it was so backed up that it was impossible to leave,” Shelby says. “His mother was sick and he didn’t have a way to get her [medical] help, so they went back. They didn’t think it would be a big deal.”
Shortly after, the man told them, the flood forced the family into the upper level of their house and then onto the roof. In the chaos, his granddaughters were swept into the roiling water. Clark says the man reached into the torrent to pluck one girl out and when he returned for the second, she was gone. It was there, on the roof of the house after the storm passed, that his mother died. The graves had been placed in their memory.
The man “was traumatized” by the incident, Shelby says, that he had mourned the loss of his loved ones and was resolved to carry on in their memory.
But, Kelly Jo Clark, the associate pastor for youth at the Union Congregational Church (UCC) who led the trip, says, “He wasn’t mad. He was excited to tell everyone about the place being rebuilt and everyone coming back. There was a sense of hope that was amazing.”
While the group from the UCC listened to the man’s story, two young girls, including the one who had survived the storm, played in the house that had been rebuilt with the help of Brad Pitt’s Make It Right campaign (makeitrightnola.org).
In the absence of any other earnest effort at rebuilding the Gulf Coast, non-profit groups like Make it Right have stepped in to put volunteers to work in areas that need it most. Clark says, “It was interesting to see all of the new growth amongst the condemned homes that are still there, with markings on the doors from when they checked houses after the hurricane.”
Clark had considered going elsewhere for the trip, but settled on New Orleans, knowing it would be a place that needed the help and was in some ways close to home. But in other ways, she says, the Gulf Coast offered the students an experience a world away from their own.
“I knew that they were still rebuilding [in Louisiana] but also that it could be an area of the country that some of these kids had never been to,” Clark said. “I thought it could also be a learning and cultural opportunity and a place where we could do some good.”
The group found work through Hands On New Orleans (handsonneworleans.org), a “clearinghouse for other non profits,” Clark says, that puts volunteers in contact with people in the Gulf Coast region that can use the help.
A Latino farmer’s cooperative in the Louisiana swamp was the first to put them to work, pulling weeds and picking vegetables in a garden that “was six inches under water,” says Tina Shoup, who went on the trip with her 17-year-old son, Drew.
Shoup had been to New Orleans before, but not since Hurricane Katrina swept through, and the 100-degree heat caught her off guard. Clark adds, “We had ant bites for days and days.” Despite the heat and discomfort, they were both impressed that the kids pressed on.
“The people that lived there were like, ‘how are you guys out there working.’ But they powered through it,” Shoup says. “They did an awesome job.”
When the group finished its time at the co-op, they headed to an area just outside the city of New Orleans’ and got to see how the politics of place had affected the recovery effort. Clark says, “When money came in to the Gulf Coast, because they (the people of St. Bernard Parish) weren’t in New Orleans proper and the state wanted to rebuild the tourist area first, one man we talked to said they didn’t get a lot of trickle down. But they did build the community center after the flood to provide for the area.”
At the center, Shelby remembers sorting clothing and handing it out to people from the area that were still struggling to keep their heads above water, even after the flood was gone.
She had seen the devastation left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina on a trip with Habitat for Humanity a year after the storm had passed. After returning in August, Shelby said she “wanted to see how it had changed,” and traveled through vast areas of improvement, but with a pervasive poverty that couldn’t be ignored.
“There is still so much poverty in a lot of places in New Orleans,” she said. “The people were very friendly, regardless of what had happened to them. It was cool to see that even though they had been through a lot and they had been upset, they were still so nice.”
Zane Wrisley, a freshman who has been on several mission trips closer to home, said it wasn’t just one part of the trip that made the experience; it was the whole experience of “having fun and getting to know each other better and working hard a lot.”
But the group’s final stop on the trip was one of Shelby and Zane’s favorites. Along with the non-profit Green Light New Orleans (greenlightneworleans.org), they visited homes in low income housing areas and exchanged incandescent light bulbs with Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs), addressing economic concerns and environmental ones at the same time.
Zane says, “The Green Light was amazing. We had a sheet that could tell people how much money they save by switching to CFLs and some people were going to save like $2,000, which is amazing when you’re only making $18,000 a year.”
“A lot of these people had rebuilt, so they had homes but that was it,” Clark said of the job with Green Light New Orleans. “They were just up from homeless. The kids weren’t sure about doing it. But that was what the assignment was and once they did it they thought it was a cool thing to go into people’s houses and hear stories first hand.”
What they learned was that, despite the devastation and hardship, Gulf Coast residents, for the most part, were happy they stayed or returned after the storm to rebuild. The 17 students from a mountain paradise learned that people and their possessions should never be confused.
“More than anything I guess I learned it’s crazy how much people can lose and still be open and friendly and put it all behind them,” Shelby said of her trip to the Gulf Coast. “We, as humans, can go through something so terrible – some people lost everything, from stuff to lives – and through all that they could still be friendly and open and tell us about their experience.”
Clark is afraid if Crested Butte youth aren’t exposed to a wider world, they’ll be lulled into thinking this is reality. “The kids here are so sheltered and privileged that it seems vital that they get out to see the rest of the world,” she said. “We kind of live in La La Land here and we can get hyper focused on our selves.”
So Clark and the kids are already looking at places to lend a hand next summer.
