A Spring Break in New Orleans

By: Deepti Dhir

Arranging her room over-flowing with piles of clothing, 22 year-old Shontia
Lowe seemed like the typical college senior, enjoying a warm, sunny
afternoon while cleaning her wardrobe. But how Shontia spent her spring
break was anything but typical. "I did not want a traditional or stereotypical
spring break which would consist of sand and seas. Instead, I wanted to do
something meaningful that would give back to the community,” said
Shontia, a native of Barbados,
and soon to be graduate of Mount
Holyoke College. After applying
to the Alumnae Association, she
soon became one of only seven
chosen applicants from her
school to help out in the post-
hurricane South.

"I also wanted to see what was
really going on in New Orleans
for myself, especially after
Hurricane Katrina," she added,
hanging her clothes, and showing me a cute dress she had bought at a rip-off
price. Side by side other alumnae and students, Shontia worked with
Habitat for Humanity on housing projects in New Orleans, involving
everything from flooring to hammering nails to painting doors and walls.

Shontia spoke of the watermarks still present where the water had collected.
A young woman of five feet five inches, Shontia said the watermarks stood
over her. “Can you imagine a city with water that high?” she asked me, “I
can’t.”

She also saw houses printed with X’s and numbers such as zero, one or two.
Shontia soon discovered that the numbers indicated the count of deceased
that had been found. “Speechless” and “quite shocking” were Shontia’s
reactions to these events.

She encountered other homes with the same infamous X and the words
“involuntary demolition”. These families had vacated their residence,
deciding to leave for good. Without the means to reconstruct their homes,
or lacking flood insurance, they had no choice. "The most memorable
experience for me was to see first hand, the precarious and more so dismal
housing conditions people are still living in even until today. Seeing the
extent of the damages and the slow progress being made is forever etched in
my memory," said Shontia. Still other residences were in such an unsound
state that families had to make do by living in trailers near them, a sight
Shontia witnessed herself.

As part of her trip, Shontia
learned about the role of levees
that guard against flooding. An
organization called levees.org
says that when levees in New
Orleans gave way, it was because
of “engineering failures”. Shontia
helped me understand this
phenomenon, as she spread her
arms to show me the size of a
proper levee and then bringing
her arms together, shrank that
size, depicting the actual levees
in the commercial areas of New Orleans. The sad lesson? We had a chance
to scale down the devastation from the hurricane. Nature is not the only
culprit here.

But Shontia’s time was not all work and no play. She relished in southern
food, from bread pudding to Beignets to seafood she said was “ridiculously
delicious”. As she tasted bits and pieces of southern culture, she mingled
with its people as well. "Every person in New Orleans has a story, whether
good or bad,” she said. A conversation at a local bar between a Mount
Holyoke alum and a native of New Orleans struck home for Shontia, “People
in New Orleans are extremely grateful to those who lend a helping hand, but
at the same time, there is a sense that the majority of the U.S., especially
the government, has more or less closed their ears to their cry for help.  
Something as simple as offering a listening ear means a lot to them.”

Shontia’s motto from her spring break: “A little goes a long way”. “It really
doesn't take much to give to others,” she added, “Just painting a door or
hammering a nail can go a long way. After my experience in New Orleans, I
now make an even greater effort to give to others in my daily life.” Athena
thanks Shontia for taking us back to the lives of those affected by Katrina.
Next time you are planning your holiday, see if can you steer clear of the
sunny beaches in Florida, and try, as Shontia puts it, to “just give.”