Student Life > Community Service > Annual Projects

Alternative Spring Break

For the past 4 years, Arcadia University's Community Service Office has planned Alternative Spring Break service trips for students and staff. These trips give students a chance to lend a helping hand in needy areas and learn about the culture of other regions as well as networking with other University students. For first trip in Spring of 2004, a small group travelled to Tallahassee, Florida to assist with Habitat for Humanity with hurricane relief. For Spring Break 2005, an enthusiastic group of students travelled to Tijuana, Mexico to assist Esperanza International with its community building initiatives. Spring Break 2006 and 2007 brought the need for a response to the hurricanes that devastated the Gulf Region. A large group of Arcadia students travelled to Jean Lafitte, Louisiana and Boothsville, Louisiana in the Bayou Region to assist Southern Mutual Help Association with its rebuilding efforts. In the week of working, the group worked on rebuilding 7 homes throughout the community.

Alternative Spring Break 2009 - Jean Lafitte, Louisiana

This year’s spring break could have been spent lounging at home playing video games, recovering from midterms, making an extra buck working, or just catching up on sleep. And although all of those things would have been nice, I, along with about 40 other Arcadia undergrads and alumni were lucky enough to come along on an alternative spring break trip to rebuild after the hurricane damage in Jean Lafitte, Louisiana. It was a long week of hard work, but it was worth it with experiencing a new culture, bonding with each other, and helping those who can not help themselves after these tragedies.

Named after the pirate, Jean Lafitte is a very small town (population only about 2,137 at the 2000 census) located on Bayou Barataria in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. Like many places in Louisiana and Mississippi, the effects of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans were shattering and long-lasting. As the center of Katrina passed east of New Orleans on August 29, 2005, winds downtown were in the Category 3 range with frequent intense gusts and tidal surge. Though the most severe portion of Katrina missed the city, hitting nearby St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, the storm surge caused more than 50 breaches in drainage canal levees and also in navigational canal levees and precipitated the worst engineering disaster in the history of the United States. By August 31, 2005, eighty percent of New Orleans was flooded, with some parts under 15 feet of water.

Most of the city's levees designed and built by the United States Army Corps of Engineers broke, including the 17th Street Canal levee, the Industrial Canal levee, and the London Avenue Canal floodwall. These breaches were responsible for most of the flooding, according to a June 2007 report by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Oil refining stopped so the price of petrol increased all over the world. Ninety percent of the residents of southeast Louisiana were evacuated in the most successful evacuation of a major urban area in the nation's history. Despite this, many remained (mainly the elderly and poor). The Louisiana Superdome was used as a designated "refuge of last resort" for those who remained in the city. The city flooded due primarily to the failure of the federally built levee system. Many who remained in their homes had to swim for their lives, wade through deep water, or remain trapped in their attics or on their rooftops. Final reports indicate that the official death toll, according to the Louisiana Department of Health, was 1,464. Even years later, many Louisianans are still out of their damaged homes, or living in poor conditions because of financial difficulties. And that is where service groups like us come in.

Arriving in the small town of Jean Lafitte may have been somewhat of a culture shock to some of us. We arrived early in the morning and spent the first day touring the different houses we would be working on and even visiting some old ones that had been already repaired. It was funny how we immediately drew attention to ourselves just walking down the street, as we stuck out like a sore thumb everywhere we went. Eventually, we got use to traffic slowing down to stare. Staying in a Marine Museum right on the beautiful bayou (no alligators spotted there!), and were lucky enough to have a lot of space and a lot of bunk beds. Although we spent nearly half the week with no electricity or heat in the ice cold showers, we all made it work without getting hypothermia.

A group of mostly girls in the Deep South, some of us had to work extra hard to prove that girls can do just as good a job as the boys, and ended up shocking them all. Given a week, we (girls and boys) made a huge difference at each house. By the end of the long week, students working on the trailer ripped up the rotted floor, patched leaking holes, took out nails and other and cleaned up well enough for the next service group to begin rebuilding. Those of us working on this trailer were the least lucky, with the most damage, the worst conditions, and even went without power tools on the first day. The second house, simply called “the drywall house” got its walls finished and cleaned, making it look more like a home again. At what we called “the yellow house”, we learned that some of the home owners were more greatful than others, yet it didn’t make us work any less hard at repairing the roof, putting down baseboards, and painting. I was lucky enough to work on Ms. Daisy’s house, which not only had the luxury of power tools, but actually had the owner of the house working with us just as hard. We had the privilege to get to know not only Ms. Daisy, a proud grandmother, but her whole family. Although at times an armed, nail-gun happy Ms. Daisy was a little scary (but always funny), she had a huge heart and treated us all with southern hospitality as we insulated and finished her ceiling, paneled, and painted.

It is hard to fully understand the extent of the damage left by hurricanes Gustav, Katrina, and Rita while living hurricane-free in a cozy suburb of Philadelphia, but amazing to connect to these people who lost nearly everything due to the hurricane, who actually knew first hand from personal experience, and fascinating to hearing their personal stories about their own personal tragedies. It is hard to picture the scene, hard to put yourself in their shoes. It is hard to imagine being trapped inside your attic, or swept away by a flood, or even coming home to find your home you’ve lived in your entire life only a big pile of unrecognizable debris. We got to hear what the news can not show us or tell us. It is hard to imagine something like this happening to us, and hard to believe it had happened to them. We were even lucky enough to have what had to have been the best tour guide in the New Orleans area lead us around the city on our huge bus. An ex-history teacher, he was born and raised in the small town of Gentile, the site having the most deaths during hurricane Katrina. His home town will never be the same, however, and you would never have known by looking at the wreckage that it was once a nice area to grow up and live. Some of the houses still had spray paint on the wall from the rescuers who had come searching for people trapped in their homes, indicating how many were found alive or dead. On many of the houses you still could see the unbelievably high water line imprinted upon it, even years later. It made what we were doing there that much more meaningful, knowing that we were part of rebuilding this amazing New Orleans area that was so full of character and culture. It makes sense, when you are there to experience it all, why these people have chosen to rebuild instead of move to safer areas.

Overall, we learned that even a small group of somewhat inexperienced college students can make a huge difference, that southern food is really the best food (but not entirely the healthiest), that New Orleans is pretty pointless at night if you are under twenty-one, that Piggly Wiggly’s is a good enough substitution for Wawa, and that alligators really like marshmallows. I don’t think any of us will forget our time there.

— Rae McCue