Persons of the Week: Howard University Students

March 24, 2006 — -- When students at Howard University set out to spend spring break helping Gulf Coast residents clean up from Hurricane Katrina, they figured finding 100 volunteers would mean success.

"We thought we'd get 100, and we thought that'd be great," Alexis Logan said. "To have 100 committed Howard University students going down to New Orleans."

Instead, more than 250 students signed up and boarded the buses. "It's almost a 20-hour bus ride, a loud and rowdy busful of young people," said student Lisa Rawlings. "And when we got to New Orleans, a hush fell over the bus."

The students insisted on heading for the hardest-hit neighborhood of New Orleans: the Ninth Ward.

"You stopped at the Lower Ninth Ward and had an opportunity to take in what had happened there," Rawlings said. "There was complete silence. There was no sound coming from the Ninth Ward."

Logan, who is studying political science, added, "The situation was nothing that you could have prepared for."

One of her fellow volunteers, H. Anthony Moore, a history major who wants to be a politician, said he was shocked by what he saw. "It was like a Third World country," he said.

Rawlings said the students were "kinda rocked to their core to touch and feel and see and smell and hear what Mother Nature really is capable of."

The students worked gutting homes down to their structures so they could be rebuilt -- a grueling assignment.

"It consisted of putting on [protective] suits, masks, goggles, helmets, boots, hard hats," Logan said. "We had to be protected because a lot of these houses were infested with black deadly mold."

Moore said the task was "incredibly gross."

"I recall pulling out a refrigerator, just six months of food," he said. "And the smell, it's just all over your clothes. But you knew it was worth it because you were helping out a family."

Logan said the people of New Orleans "were just like me. They were just like my grandparents, but everything was taken away."

The students from the historically black Howard University felt a connection to the community where the black population had been so deeply affected.