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I think for our students it is a shock.
I guess last year for me it was the tour and hearing the stories of people that were right
there during the hurricane, staying through it, hearing about people losing their family
and friends and watching them die and not be able to help them.
So you went to visit somebody in their home and they weren’t feeling up to coming out
of their bedroom?
Yep.
And so you sat for how long?
Pulled up a chair. I don’t even know I lost my track of time at least a few hours.
It was three hours.
Three hours. Yeah, three hours. Inched my way up, had originally started at the couch
in the living room, than started because I couldn’t hear her, than inched my way up
standing, than I grabbed a chair and pulled that down and basically me sitting in a dank
hallway talking to a sheet to the right of me.
And he sat outside this woman’s room she was ill to get out of bed and to embarrassed
because of the way she looked to emerge from her room. But she still remembers that interaction;
in fact we just talked about it this last trip.
We work with older adults that are homebound. And that is really interesting and unique
in a different way because their stories are eighty years under their belts and so they
can provide just this depth and context as to what is happening in the city and what’s
been happening.
We worked with one church and we kind of cycled through some of the same people. One really
poignant experience that I had was the first year I worked pretty intensely with this mother
her two daughters and a baby that lived with her and at the end of that we kind of felt
really good about the interactions we had they talked a lot about Katrina they talked
a lot about the stuff that they were going through. It felt really positive.
There’s another woman who students have visited Miss Ida who is a woman in her 80’s
who was in the floods and climbing up the bridge being rescued by a boat when the water
was up to her neck and having to climb up on a bridge and was displaced for a long time
and than was able to return. One of the things that I am completely touched by is that we
have taken pictures of Miss Ida with student visitors when I went back a second time and
saw that in addition to a picture of her family that there was a picture of the students who
had visited the year before sitting on her table she has very few possessions but she
has kept a collection of the photographs of the ---- students who have visited because
it means that much to her.
The students that have gone and who have since graduated are still in touch. They still come
to events related to the work in New Orleans. I think that the impact that it has on them
is a commitment to civic engagement well beyond the work they do in New Orleans.