| Katrina Destroys Roofs, Hillel Students Shingle Them |
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| Written by Amanda Milstein | |||||
| Wednesday, 01 February 2006 | |||||
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A Report on Hillel’s Winter Break Trip to the Gulf Coast As my plane descended into the Gulfport, Mississippi airport, I wondered about the blue roofs that dotted the landscape. Are brilliant blue roofs a feature of southern home design that I had never heard of? I soon discovered that blue is the color of the tarps that cover rooftops ravished by Hurricane Katrina—roofs that have remained in disrepair now since August. That’s where I, and 135 Jewish students and professionals from 16 colleges, enter the scene. We participated in Hillel’s Alternative Winter Break trip to shingle the roofs of homes in Biloxi, Mississippi that were devastated by Katrina. Before I arrived in Biloxi, I had assumed that the trip would be a sort of self-indulgent, privileged way of helping when my help was not really needed. I imagined the Gulf Coast swamped with volunteers, with the cleanup almost over and little work to be done. But the devastation we witnessed was incredible. Trees were pushed inside of living rooms, graffiti was sprawled on unlivable homes (one said, “We’re home, you loot, we shoot!”), and entire neighborhoods were completely leveled to a scattering of bricks. Around the houses was a sharp smell of mold, the olfactory equivalent of fingernails on the blackboard. I was completely flabbergasted that our government has allowed this area to continue to exist in a state of shambles. The town was filled with different people milling about, rebuilding and shmoozing: construction workers, volunteers, and homeowners. We met one woman whose roof had been repaired by a Hillel group the week before; she spoke of how difficult it was to find someone to fix her house because of the relatively few numbers of construction workers available. But now that her roof had been fixed, she still needed to find someone to remove the mold from the interior of her house, drywall it, and redo the wiring. Miles upon miles of gutted houses were waiting for the same kind of repairs. At times, while we squatted on rooftops and nailed down shingles, I wondered if our efforts were for naught, if the repaired homes would be wiped out with the next hurricane. After Shabbat we Hillel students visited a casino: gambling is one of Biloxi’s major industries, and we wanted to get a feel for the town in its former glory. Since most of the students were not old enough to gamble, we danced to the music of two jazz musicians, and taught them to play “Hava Nagila” from someone’s cell phone ring tone. Our enthusiastic Hora dancing, though it perplexed the gamblers around us, was a much-needed release from five consecutive days of shingling and exposure to the difficult reality of devastation that surrounded us. Almost five months post-Katrina and immediately after we college students returned back to our academic bubbles, the residents of the Gulf Coast get little respite from the daily stench and sight of the debris that was once their home. If you wish to help with the rebuilding effort, ask your campus Hillel if it will be involved in the Tzedek Hillel spring break trips to Gulfport and Biloxi. You can also volunteer with Hands-On USA, which provides free food and shelter for volunteers. Visit Hands-On USA at www.handsonusa.org.
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