Life lessons in the Gulf's living lab

ACORN is organizing a stream of volunteers in New Orleans. Gabrielle Thal-Pruzan, who traveled here from Northampton, Mass., as part of Feminists of Smith [College] Unite, says that despite the throngs of students eager to help, not enough of her classmates are continuing to think about the disaster's effects. "So many things happened this past year, so this is just one more," she says. "I couldn't understand it until I came and saw it."

The hours spent wearing breathing masks as they cleared out moldy furniture and drywall have been instructive in surprising ways. "We learned to communicate physically," Ms. Ihmoud says, contrasting it to the verbal nature of classroom interaction.

The work gives people who usually focus on policy a close-up view. "I found a baby picture in my shovel of dirt," says Madeline Giscombe, an urban-planning student from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Every day, someone has a similar bittersweet story. At one work site, students hauled thousands of soggy books to the curb in front of a small house. Ms. Thal-Pruzan saw a feminist version of the Bible in the mound. Some contractors would charge $6,000 to gut a house - labor students are doing for free - says Brian Lewis, an ACORN staffer. "They've been awesome," he says. "They have more energy than people who do it for wages."

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Near the end of the trip, the Sarah Lawrence volunteers gather at the Biscuit Palace, an eclectic French Quarter bed and breakfast. It's their nightly meeting, a way to regroup and reflect.

PernaLyn Baier recalls conversing in Spanish with a day laborer. The working conditions were fine, she says, "but the hardest thing is, no one treats him like a person.... I thought, 'How long has it been since anyone's really talked to him?' "

To the backdrop of quiet sobs - her own and her fellow volunteers' - she explains how strange it felt in contrast to her work with laborers in New York, where she can connect them to a network of services. "I was like, I can't do anything. What am I supposed to say?"

"It sounds like he really just needed to talk," Mr. Hubbard, the trip adviser, says reassuringly.

The mood brightens later when Henderson passes around a parting gift from Mary Solomon: a golden coconut with a painted face and stuck-on "googly eyes," as she calls them. During Mardi Gras, it's one of the most coveted items tossed to the crowd in the Zulu Parade. Now it's been adopted as the group mascot.

• In December, about three dozen Dartmouth students took one of what they hope will be many trips to Biloxi, Miss., over the next two years. Working with Hands On USA, they decided on five ways to help the community: creating a documentary about housing advocacy; taking oral histories; conducting art projects with schoolchildren; offering résumé-writing workshops; and putting some muscle into demolition/construction.

• This month, 40 students from Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama are traveling south to help with the recovery. Before their departure, they spent a week on campus learning about the environmental and social context.

• At the University of California, Berkeley, law students who helped hurricane victims over winter break will spend class time this semester preparing policy papers on issues such as flood insurance and antidiscrimination provisions in disaster-response plans. A Berkeley radio production class will conduct field recordings in the New Orleans area with NPR's "The Kitchen Sisters," Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva.

Information on planning service trips to the Gulf Coast is available at www.nationalservice.gov/urap and www.alternativebreaks.org

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