STAFF WRITER
JILLIAN STEVENSON

There is work yet to be done.

Six of the 29 St. John Fisher College students who volunteered their efforts in New Orleans last May reiterated this point during a recent Four Freedoms Week event, “Fisher and Katrina: Disaster Relief and Reflection.”

Addressing a crowd of about 300 in Basil Auditorium on Monday, Nov. 6, as part of SWAV’s Four Freedoms Week, the students joined anti-racism writer and activist Tim Wise on a panel to detail and discuss the conditions of the poor in the flood ravaged city.

Initiating the presentation with a slide show of gutted homes and amassed piles of personal belongings that had been destroyed by the lingering floodwaters, each of the students agreed that the job was daunting.

Junior Jessica Null, who sat on the panel, remembered one of the homes that had been under 17 feet of water for more than three weeks, and its elderly owner.

“We were taking whatever was left of her life and throwing it out on the street.  Seventy-some years of her life were gone,” Null said.

The volunteers went to New Orleans nearly nine months after Katrina broke the levees, and were shocked by how little had been accomplished.

“Someone said it would take 10 years to rebuild.  I don’t even think that’s long enough,” Null said. 

Junior Lauren Ogilvie, another panelist, described a “weird blast” she kept hearing as she worked on gutting yet another waterlogged home.  The bizarre alarm, she was told, signaled that more dead bodies had been recovered.

Wise asserted that what happened in New Orleans was not a result of a natural disaster.  He said that, having lived there for 10 years, he had seen equal destruction after heavy rains. 

The levees were in a state of neglect and the wetlands had been allowed to erode for the benefits of the real estate and oil industries, he said.

“[The levees] broke as a result of human decisions,” Wise said.

Wise spoke with urgency, running out of breath at the end of sentences.

“It is only system failure if the system is set up to help people who are suffering.  But the system was not set up to take care of the have-nots, only the haves.  The system worked,” Wise said.

Sally Vaughan, director of community service, and Dr. Carolyn Vacca, one of the nine faculty members from the College who also went to New Orleans with the panelists, said that politics weren’t part of the volunteer effort.

“I’m not going there (politics), but I think he lit a fire and forced us all to think.  There’s more than community service to be done,” Vaughan said in regards to Wise’s comments.

Wise used the stories of the panelists as examples of the racial injustices in New Orleans.

“Most people won’t tell you what you are really seeing,” he said after the volunteers told what they saw.

Dr. Ruth Harris, a faculty member at Fisher who attended the discussion wasn’t sure if student reaction was positive or negative.

“There was a lot of nonverbal body language when Tim spoke.  Maybe it was the break from the exhilaration of the panelists.  Why is it still shocking to us to hear the words ‘inequality’ and ‘privilege’?” Harris said.

Email address: jls08655@sjfc.edu