By Maria Hartz
Contributing Writer
When your average college student tells you that they’re traveling to New Orleans, LA for spring break, I’m sure the first thing that comes to your mind is more-than-slightly-intoxicated girls wearing more-than-slightly-scandalous outfits walking down Bourbon Street. Well, let me be the first to tell you that my spring break in New Orleans was probably the furthest thing from your mental depiction of a college student let loose in the French Quarter.
My week in New Orleans with 12 other Saint Rose students was spent in the Lower Ninth Ward, an area of New Orleans left completely devastated after Hurricane Katrina nearly wiped out the entire city almost 10 years ago. The Lower Ninth is probably the furthest thing from a tourist attraction that you’re going to see while in New Orleans.
This is a place where only about 30 percent of the original population has returned to after Katrina, and is full of New Orleanians living far below the poverty line. You’re certainly not going to see any plastic beads getting thrown off balconies in these streets, especially because the majority of residents here barely have a livable home, let alone one with a balcony.
While in New Orleans, we worked with the non-profit organization LowerNine.org, which began working almost immediately after Katrina to get original residents of the Ninth Ward back home. If a homeowner is able to cover the cost of materials, LowerNine.org will provide the labor through the help of volunteers, like the Saint Rose Alternative Spring Break group.
I had the privilege of being on a worksite with five other members of our group, working on the home of a Lower Ninth Ward resident, Annie*. Annie’s once blue and beautiful childhood home had been destroyed by the floods caused by Katrina, leaving it with a cracked foundation, rotting roof, and a portion of the house detached from the original structure. Even worse, Annie suffered through an ongoing battle with the city of New Orleans, forcing her to court on three different occasions to prove that she could get it fixed, simply so they would not destroy her home. That is when Annie turned to LowerNine.org, and slowly but surely, her home is on the road to being livable once again.
So what now? What’s there to do when me, probably your not-so-average college student, tells someone that they spent their college spring break in New Orleans? Well, I suppose that I would tell them that my week was spent hammering nails, and not just getting hammered. Building a deck, not catching beads. Fixing a roof, and not standing on one yelling to the people on Bourbon Street below.
It’s the people like Saint Rose Alternative Spring Break students who are going to break the stigma of college spring break. From New Orleans to West Palm Beach to San Francisco, we all had the opportunity to change someone’s mind about what a college spring break can look like. I can only hope that one day, the majority of college student’s spring breaks will be ones that break the stigma, and truly make a difference.
