Scaling the ivory tower

Our daughter spent part of her winter break from Skidmore in New Orleans. Since 2005, she has volunteered to work in the Katrina recovery effort for some part of every school vacation, making her a natural pick for peer leader on her first trip with a Skidmore contingent.

When she first volunteered, as a high school sophomore, her enthusiasm was bound up in the novelty and camaraderie of the experience. She learned to pull nails and mud sheetrock and to feel exhausted after a day of real physical labor. She met people whose lives had been washed away in a day. Everybody in New Orleans had a story to tell, of loss and heartbreak.

Over time, working in the most devastated area of the city, the Lower Ninth Ward, she met people who lived under the highway overpass, or in trailers patched with flattened tin cans to keep the giant cockroaches at bay.

She became a favorite of some of the genuine characters of the Lower Ninth, like Darren, the middle-aged man who travels with a stuffed teddy bear as he shuttles volunteers to their work sites.

“Sing for me, baby,” he said to our daughter on her first encounter with Darren, and she did. Her sweet and sultry rendition of “Summertime” entranced him and he has been her protector ever since. Apparently Darren asks everyone to sing for him, but few ever do.

When the Skidmore group was looking for a place to put their volunteers this winter, our daughter suggested the place she knows best and the organization that works there: LowerNine.org. Based on her experience and enthusiasm, the college made arrangements to spend a week helping to rebuild.

If Katrina had not devastated the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, it would still have been ripe for a volunteer effort. The private homes were modest bungalows belonging to the working poor. The public housing projects were long overdue for major repairs and the residents lacked the political muscle to make things happen.

Long before the nation failed the people of the Lower Ninth, the state of Louisiana failed them. Still, it was a vibrant community where some of the poorest of the poor had homes of their own.

Some people think this part of New Orleans was better off sunk in Mississippi mud. There are those who think the whole area should be bulldozed to make way for a giant casino. The organizers of LowerNine.org are social and political activists who think that the Lower Ninth should be rebuilt with the protection of better levees. They are the only supporters people like Darren have.

When impressionable young people meet and work alongside residents of the Lower Ninth Ward, they see them as the people they are and question why their government has ignored them. This is how change happens in a stubborn society.

When the Skidmore group, chaperoned by staff, arrived at their work site, they were apparently shocked by the environment. The adults abruptly decided to move the group to a Habitat for Humanity project in Slidell, a suburb of New Orleans.

When I told this story to someone recently, her response was “What did you expect? You sent her to an ivory tower and you’re surprised they want to keep her locked up?” I admit I never thought of that.

What disturbed our daughter most about this experience was the unwillingness of her peers to engage in a community of true need. She told me she looked back in her journals to her own first time in New Orleans and saw a girl frustrated by the enormity of the task and the smallness of her ability to affect it.

Over time, and with the guidance of her high school teachers, she saw herself as part of a larger effort. She came to realize that her presence was as important as the nails she drove, the roofs she patched. That, she said, is the lesson she wants to instill in her peers at Skidmore, when they return to New Orleans.

(Faithful readers of The Muse will want to know: we spent Inauguration Day on the couch, like most of the world. The decision not to brave the turnpikes and the cold was made at 2:00 a.m. on January 20, and never regretted.)

- Cass Collins