Students Affected By Relief

NEW ORLEANS—Her checkbook. Her new dinette set. Her jewelry box with the golden pendant. Helen L. Smith, 70, watched her life, which she had left behind seven months ago, now leave her home.

Smith had just returned to her New Orleans home that Friday morning, and seven Harvard undergraduates had met her with heavy gloves and face masks.

Now they were gutting her home, carrying her moldy belongings to the curb with aching arms as others tore doors from hinges with crowbars.

Smith watched silently, her face hidden by a mask.

As the spring break volunteers deposited the debris on the curb, the pile slowly grew to span the length of the modest New Orleans home.

“I was going through all their possessions and throwing them all out on the sidewalk,” said Gayatri S. Datar ’07, who coordinated service trips in the city. “This was kind of when it really all hit me....I was getting a taste of the pain.”

As she carried a plate of glass with another volunteer, Datar stepped carefully by Smith, quiet.

Datar said that in the days after, she broke into tears every few hours.

CALL TO ACTION

Since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, Harvard students have participated in service trips to the area. These trips have offered insight into the intersection of poverty, class, and race.

Nearly 70 students traveled to New Orleans over spring break with the support of the Phillips Brooks House Association alone.

The week-long trips offered the students a fast-forward lesson in post-disaster uncertainty and stagnation, and one week might not have been enough time to fully grasp it. Students like Datar witnessed the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, visible across the city in everything from dysfunctional traffic lights to the blue tarps marking spots where residents had axed through attic roofs.

Later that day in the neighborhood of Gentilly, Smith, looking down at the remains of her home, remembered what it had looked like before.

“It was so nice,” she said.

Few of the student volunteers had known New Orleans before the storm, though, and they were left to reconstruct mental images of what the Big Easy once had been.

ANOTHER KIND OF TRAUMA

Research suggests that trauma is not confined to the immediate victims of a disaster. Relief workers and volunteers—the second wave of people on the scene——are often shaken as well.

Professor of Psychology Richard J. McNally cited studies showing how rescue workers or firefighters were affected by terrorist acts like Sept. 11 or the 1995 Oklahoma City bombings.

“If you’re just witnessing the carnage and the physical destruction of the city, that can be sort of a distressing experience,” said McNally, who serves on the Harvard Medical School’s Hurricane Katrina Community Advisory Group, which tracks displaced Gulf residents.

In New Orleans, everyone has a story to tell.

Many student volunteers noted the powerful effects of listening to survivors. The phenomenon is called “vicarious traumatization,” said Karestan C. Koenen, assistant professor of society, human development, and health at the Harvard School of Public Health.

“If you keep hearing these stories about people whose lives were torn apart, it sort of makes you question whether things are predictable,” Koenen said. “You can feel helpless.”

But while witnessing the aftermath of a disaster exacts an emotional toll, volunteering may help mediate the sense of helplessness.

“One of the ways humans cope is by helping people,” Koenen said. “You’re able to actually improve someone’s life or aid people, and it can make the situation seem meaningful.”

‘BLOCK AFTER BLOCK’

A day after gutting Smith’s home, Datar flew back to Cambridge with her volunteer team. Previously she had volunteered at a New Orleans high school over intersession. She said the work over spring break proved just as emotionally draining. Even after her return to campus, she had trouble parting with New Orleans.

“Every couple hours or so, I would be coughing up sawdust. When I wasn’t even crying, I was just not talking,” she said of her first days back.

Colleston A. Morgan Jr. ’07, who led the team Datar was a part of, also found the experience difficult to explain to others.

Yesterday in the Science Center’s Greenhouse, a female student ran into him and learned he had spent spring break in New Orleans.

“How was that?” she asked, hesitating before saying the last word.

“It was different,” he said. “Different.”

Morgan didn’t explain more to her.

Friday’s gutting had drained his reserves, he said, and the work remaining on the Gulf Coast overwhelmed him.

“We gutted a house, several houses,” he said. “But it’s still only one family in a city where you drive block after block after block, and it’s all the same. And if you drive out of the city, you drive into Mississippi and Alabama and back down to the bayou.”

Morgan trailed off, as if seeing the destruction.

In the Ninth Ward, a heavily flooded, poor neighborhood where several undergraduate teams worked over spring break, rusty cars had been turned upside down and rugs flung over tree branches. One porch was missing its house. On it sat a single folding chair. And the debris lay piled into mounds like primitive graves, reminders of homes that once were.

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