feature stories
Helping pick up the pieces
May 24, 2007 5:12 PM
Trip to New Orleans shows Brooklyn students
Back at school, teacher Terry Samuel (right) leads a discussion about the trip with her students, who paid their own airfare and hotel costs. One student who didn’t make the trip — Usman Hameedi, who is Pakastani-American — still served as project accountant. He said too many people think the disaster in New Orleans is only a problem for black people; but, “It’s everyone’s problem, it’s the nation.” He felt it was his responsibility as an “erudite individual” to help his classmates who flew down.
Twenty-five high school students from Brooklyn have recently returned from a class trip to New Orleans and already they’re talking about going back.
Primarily, they went to roll up their sleeves and dig in to help rebuild what one student described as “the city of love,” but while there, they also got a taste of what it means to love New Orleans.
Terry Samuel, a spunky 33-year-old teacher of five years at Benjamin Banneker Academy, led the expedition during spring recess, March 30-April 7. She has been the thrust behind the school raising more than $11,000 for Hurricane Katrina survivors. She wanted to go a step further and teach students that they can make a difference in meeting the needs of a people hit by one of the worst natural disasters in history.
“We need to really show our students what it is to contribute to community because we as adults don’t do it enough,” the English teacher said during a recent class discussion about the trip. “I wanted the children to go so they can pick up the reins from the adults,” in doing the work necessary to rebuild one of the greatest cities of the American South, she said.
Chapter Leader Valentino Ellis said the trip “was a great opportunity for students to see firsthand something happening in this country. The TV portrays us as this great country that promotes democracy, but here at home we see the inequities that exist.”
Banneker, a school founded in 1993 by a group that included UFT District 13 Representative Armando Blasse, requires its students to complete 200 learning service hours.
But what started out as a lesson in civic responsibility turned into a mission for the teacher and her students. According to Brooklyn native Samuel, the students touched lives everywhere they went.
Much of their time was spent helping gut houses in several areas of New Orleans, including the particularly devastated 9th Ward. They worked as volunteers for ACORN, the community organizing group which is engaged in a major recovery project in New Orleans.
Samuel told her students that many of the houses — damaged nearly two years ago in the hurricane and infamous levee break — remain untouched because no one, not even the government, has committed the resources needed to do more.
The students said they were struck by the “friendly” and “hospitable” nature of the people they met. They made an extra-large thank-you card for the staff at ACORN, which hosted and trained them in the organization’s rebuilding project.
Living next door to one of the houses the students gutted were retired teachers Vic and Germaine Vassvasure. The couple was living in a FEMA trailer parked outside their flood-damaged home, for which they were still paying the mortgage and working on to return to.
“He commended us for being there,” recalled Ashley Garcia, an 11th-grader, of Vassvasure, adding that he told them that “we were the first group of students he’d seen helping to rebuild and the largest group of volunteers who were people of color.”
One day, Vassvasure cooked barbecue chicken for the students and brought it over for them, piping hot, on several trays.
Gernaine Vassvasure took the students on her own personal tour of the French Quarter. They made stops at Café DuMonde, Mardi Gras World, Congo Square and Backstreet Museum.
Student Devon James said he discovered there are “two New Orleans.” He was familiar with the media’s portrayal of a commercialized Mardi Gras destination, but the city also has roots in French, African and Native American history, he said, and local neighborhoods with their own Mardi Gras traditions. “You have to go there and touch the people to see the difference,” he said.
Like several students, Aaron Fleming was angered to see so many tourists carrying on without a thought as to what kind of life the city’s residents — those working in the restaurants and souvenir shops — faced at home. “It kind of hurt to know that Americans were being ignored because they were not wealthy … or they didn’t live in the right neighborhood,” said Fleming.
A number of students broke into tears the day they saw an elementary school that had fallen flat and belongings of its former inhabitants still scattered and unclaimed.
“You’re standing at ground level and looking at the roof of the school and seeing school books strewn in the streets, teddy bears, knapsacks, sneakers,” said Samuel.
“It strikes you that it still looks like that after, it’ll be two years in August. No one has gone to even pick up a book.”
The students don protective gear as they help gut a house in the 9th Ward.
