Vigil Spotlights Student Volunteers

For nearly two minutes, undergraduates sat silently in the Adams House Lower Common Room, heads bowed and eyes closed, their minds on the victims of a hurricane that had passed by the Gulf Coast three weeks ago.

Representing clubs such as the Black Students Association and the Students Taking On Poverty (STOP), they contemplated last night a reality they had known only secondhand, if at all, at “Katrina and Race: A Speak-Out and Vigil.”

The event, hosted by Adams House’s race relations tutors, spotlighted a group of four students who had flown to Baton Rouge last Monday on short notice.

They spent four days trying to help those who they believed were most vulnerable because of what they described as an entrenched culture of poverty and racism.

Harvard Foundation Director S. Allen Counter brought a team of four Harvard Medical School professors and two Harvard-affiliated psychologists to Baton Rouge, along with the four students: Nneka C. Eze ’07, Jennifer N. Green ’07, Elijah M. Hutchinson ’06, and Michael L. Nguyen ’08.

The Baton Rouge trip marks the first time the Harvard Foundation has directly participated in disaster relief efforts, said Counter.

Counter’s group partnered with Southern University, a historical black college in Baton Rouge. On the trip, doctors issued prescriptions to evacuees who had lost their records and brought antibiotics, bandages, and anti-depressants to shelters.

The volunteers stayed at the capital city’s Sheraton, while others in the Harvard Foundation-led group slept at the home of Louisiana Governor Kathleen B. Blanco and the Louisiana State University’s faculty club.

Nguyen spoke of translating for Vietnamese immigrants, a population of shrimpers and small business owners that had been all but ignored by the mainstream media in the aftermath of the storm.

Though their numbers were small, there was a great need for Vietnamese speakers like Nguyen to translate for non-English speakers.

He remembered a husband who had succeeded in sponsoring the immigration of his wife, a seamstress, and three children to the U.S. just one year ago. Without family in the country and relatively few skills, they had nowhere to go. They were like many of the refugees served by the student volunteers, people who lacked roots that stretched far beyond New Orleans and simply moved from shelter to some other version of temporary aid.

Chaz M. Beasley ’08, initiative coordinator of STOP, a newly formed coalition that includes some two dozen student groups in an campaign to raise funds and awareness for low-income populations, asked students to use the hurricane’s aftermath as a springboard for action.

“It didn’t take a storm to take everything away from them,” Beasley said of the low-income victims in New Orleans. “Not only did it destroy the nicer parts of the city. It also destroyed the bad parts of town. Are we going to rebuild those parts? We cannot allow this possibility of a blessing to pass us by.”

Counter said he plans to lead doctors on four-day trips every month for the rest of the calendar year, filling gaps in medical supplies and expertise for shelters underserved by the American Red Cross or the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He hopes to bring more students with him.

Counter had been at the Nobel Institute in Stockholm when images of Katrina’s devastation began appearing in Sweden’s newspapers.

Like the students who joined him with the Foundation’s funding and the doctors who paid their own way, Counter said he “was so deeply touched” that he wanted to take action as close to the scene as possible.

—Staff writer April H. N. Yee can be reached at aprilyee@fas.harvard.edu.