Fall break trips to assist Katrina relief

Nineteen University students will travel to Louisiana and Alabama with the Student Volunteer Council (SVC) to participate in Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, doing everything from cleaning up trampled gardens to clearing debris from hurricane-ravaged streets.

A month and a half after Katrina struck, much of the Gulf is still in need of repair. Ten students will go to Mobile, Ala., to assist Volunteer Mobile, a nonprofit organization that helps homeowners, especially elderly and disabled citizens, clean up debris and rebuild houses. The nine others will help rebuild homes and communities with United Way of Abbesville, La.

The SVC planners are still unsure what specific tasks lie ahead.

"There are a lot of factors ... Until we go there, we don't know the degree of catastrophe," Jessica Gheiler '08, one of the organizers of the trip, said.

Gheiler added that the students will definitely be involved in hands-on, active projects, with the workday beginning at 8 a.m. "It's going to be intense physical labor," she said.

"I saw all this tragedy on television, so I thought I'd spend my break helping people out," said Christina Jones '09, who will go to Mobile. "I felt so helpless staring at the television and seeing the disaster, and this is finally something concrete that I could do."

Jones said that her experience with Community Action in September also motivated her to participate. "[Community Action] was the best decision I made so far coming to Princeton, so I thought it would be a good way to go further," she said.

Aita Maize '07, the organizer for the Alabama trip, explained that USG Undergraduate Life Chair Tom Brown '07 referred her to Volunteer Mobile through the Princeton Alumni Association in Alabama.

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The decision to send volunteers to United Way of Louisiana was based in large part on the organization's reputation.

"We decided that the organization is established, so we know it's secure, been done before, and we knew there would be work, which is good because we wanted to actually have something to do," said Gheiler, who coordinated the Louisiana trip.

Choosing the trip locations involved a lot of research and evaluation.

"We contacted people in New Orleans, and compiled the list of people, which was a little difficult since you can't gauge who needed help the most," Gheiler said. "We were originally planning on going to two shelters, but they had closed down."

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Many other campus bodies, including Butler and Wilson Colleges, had also originally planned similar trips. "They ended up not doing that," Maize said. "But they said they would help us publicize."

Around 200 students signed up for the trip at the SVC open house in September.

SVC originally planned a first-come, first-serve application process. However, due to the low numbers of applications received, everyone who applied was admitted. One of the twenty dropped out.

Maize said she was "disappointed" that only twenty students applied, since the SVC expected to send 30 students to Alabama and 20 to Louisiana.

"At Princeton we have our motto, 'Princeton in the nation's service and in the service of all nations,' " Jones said. "But I don't know how people often try to fulfill that."

Maize said she hopes the trip will inspire future volunteer efforts.

"Hopefully, with this trip, people could get the word out that they could actually help," Maize said.