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Day 1:
Rather then spending my time trying to earn enough money to survive the rest of the school year, finally get the much needed beauty sleep my body longs for, or read those books I keep on telling myself I will get around to, I instead spent my spring break in New Orleans with a group of fellow University of Minnesota, Morris students. We helped out hurricane victims, doing for free, what FEMA can’t figure out with a multi-million dollar budget.

A few weeks before break a group of friends, myself included, decided to make a long anticipated trip to hurricane country a reality. A mutual friend of the group, Dan Ott, suggested the trip to us. Dan had taken the trip himself during winter break with a non-profit organization that his mom established out of a need to help just after the hurricanes hit. The organization, Mission from Minnesota, helped fund our trip and provided us with food and shelter through a volunteer base at the first historical Methodist church right outside the garden district in a fairly impoverished neighborhood. Other then that, UMM helped fund our gas and transportation (yes we endured a grueling 26 hr drive there and back.)

Upon arriving we really did not know what to expect. We had no idea who would be at the church, what it looked like, what the sleeping and eating situation would be, or even what exactly we would be doing. We showed up at about 8:00 at night, a few hours after a large group of about 60 college students from St. Bonaventure University in New York had arrived. We quickly found out that we would be sleeping in the churches community room that had been converted into, more or less, a barracks. The room was crowded with bunk beds built out of plywood and 2-by-4’s, all of which sat with in a few feet of each other, which were adorned with blow-up mattresses. I don’t think I have ever experienced a more bizarre sleeping situation. At any given time, I could head four people snoring around me and four others rolling over in bed on their plastic blow-up mattresses that go “sqqquuuueeeekk” in the night. Sleeping with just under a hundred other people in the same room forces you to loose all modesty and inhibition, that is if you want to be able to get to sleep at night.

The first night there we took a walk around the neighborhood, just me and most of my Minnesota boys. While walking around a neighborhood that probably wasn’t the best place for a gaggle of white kids to find themselves at 10pm, we heard a loud rap song blaring down the street. The din was loud enough to attract unwanted attention from authorities in any other part of the country, but we were in New Orleans now. We followed the trail of lyrics, “What’s your FEMA number! F#¢$ FEMA!”, to their source where we found a big black man an his weather beaten compatriot unloading building supplies from the back of a Taxi cab. Dan Bakke, one of the older students in the group, suggested that we see if they wanted any help. We approached them and asked, they were happy for the help. We soon found out their names, Horace and Roscoe, and they invited us out for drinks with them after we were done hauling.

To be continued. . .