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Jewish Community News
News: March 2007
High School students travel to
rebuild Katrina devastated Gulf Coast
By Cecily Ruttenberg
When 32 Kehillah Jewish High School juniors returned from their class trip March 1, they had suitcases filled with filthy clothes and armloads of bug bites. This is because instead of visiting the White House or the historical Maine coast, the 16 and 17-year-olds spent two days living out of a volunteer tent in Waveland, Mississippi repairing homes devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
“We were working on this one man’s house, and he said, ‘This
is your class trip? Why didn’t you go to the Bahamas or something,”
recalls Jane-Rachel Schonbrun, the director of student life and trip organizer.
“But you could tell he was really appreciative that we were there.
Every person told us that we were giving them hope and making them feel
they hadn’t been forgotten.”
Schonbrun said the school wanted to plan a trip that would provide an
exploration of American identity through a Jewish lens.What better than
a volunteer work trip to the Southern regions of the U.S. devastated by
Katrina? The trip combined a critical place and event from American history,
seen through the Jewish lens of tikkun olam.
“We want to ignite in these kids some serious ideas of how they
can make a difference in changing the world, in changing people’s
lives,” Schonbrun said. “We want to catalyze action, we want
to get them energized to come back and work on social justice concerns,
and the bigger broader picture, and really understand themselves.”
The morning after her return, 16-year-old Tom Albert was still groggy
after having arrived home close to midnight. She had had little time to
reflect on the trip, but remembered being most impacted by a visit to
the Gulf Coast.
“I put my hand in the water and the thought that this water reached
in 12 miles, to think that the water had done all that, it was pretty
intense. It made it more tangible,” said Albert.
Saadi Halil, 17, said he was truly astonished by the sight of all the
debris and rubble. “We had seen it earlier from the bus, but when
we walked around we saw the debris on the ground and embedded in the ground;
it’s something you can’t really believe until you see it,”
Halil said. “Trailers, boats, couches, houses, like the Wizard of
Oz.”
Seventeen-year-old Becky Pressman said she that it was gratifying to start
a project in the morning and finish it in the afternoon.
“It sounds like kind of a small thing, but we had to smooth out
this pile of dirt for this guy who didn’t have a driveway. There
was this huge dirt mound, and we shoveled and raked it so he could make
a driveway. It was so gratifying, because at the end we were standing
on level ground,” said Pressman.
At the end of the workdays the students and teachers would gather for
debriefing sessions. Schonbrun said a lot of students had a hard time
reconciling how conditions could still be so terrible a year-and-a-half
after the hurricane.
“I literally had kids saying ‘I didn’t think things
like this could happen in America, I thought America took care of its
own people,’” Schonbrun said.
“Kids were really surprised to discover an area of the country that
seems like it’s been abandoned.”
Students also wrestled with feeling proud of their hard work, even when
it seemed so little in the scope of all that needs to be done in the region.
Schonbrun said that everyone left feeling they wanted to do more. It was
motivating, she said, “to see these young people with energy and
spirit come, work hard and make any difference they could.”
In one email correspondence to parents during the trip, Schonbrun said that the group was committed to Pirkei Avot’s teaching: “We are not responsible to complete the task, but neither are we free to neglect it.”
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