Professor and Students Find Common Ground in New Orleans

By Sara Aboulafia

When Occidental College Professor of Political Science Caroline Heldman hopped in a truck with two students and drove 2000 miles from Los Angeles to New Orleans in 2005, she couldn’t have anticipated the number of times she would return. During her stay in the city her team did media coverage in the 7th ward and assisted with Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. Working closely with both Occidental as well as Whittier College students – her former employer – students and teacher joined forces and in the summer of 2006 met in Café Flora on Royal Street to brainstorm ideas for a class that would address issues that came up during volunteer work.

The class, called Disaster Politics and designed to prepare incoming student volunteers for their work in the city, was approved by the college and sponsored by both the Percolese and Carnegie Foundations. Both the college and students widely supported the class and the regular trips to New Orleans; this year’s group is the seventh Heldman has brought down since Katrina: “The number [of students] grows every year even though we’re getting further away from the hurricane,” Heldman said. This year, the number of Occidental volunteers moving into 1900 Deslonde in the Lower Ninth Ward to work with Common Ground has hovered around thirty, with students arriving at the end of December and leaving on the 18th of January.

Occidental Students who came to the Lower Ninth Ward for the first time often express shock at the state of the neighborhood. Jason Lehman, who was gutting a small white house his first day in the ward, admitted that he was surprised that two years after Hurricane Katrina, the neighborhood was still in such disrepair: “I didn’t know what to expect…there’s actually a lot of need down here and a lot of work to be done,” he said.

Lehman was disheartened to find objects in the house – “Silverware and dishes. And sometimes even like little stuffed animals” - reminders of the people who once lived in the home. As Professor Heldman puts it, the volunteer work that students do in New Orleans often disturbs their worldviews: “I get the sense that students come to New Orleans with ideas about how the world works and then they get here and they understand that that’s how their world works, but that’s not really how the broader world or the world beyond them work, and they’re pretty devastated.”

Heldman also works in the New Orleans Women’s Shelter with Occidental students. Since most of her students come from white, privileged backgrounds, Heldman considers it a priority to raise awareness about the history of the “male white supremacy” system and to investigate issues of class and race before they begin any “nuts and bolts” volunteer work. At the same time, Heldman hopes that the despair that her students sometimes feel isn’t simply a matter of white guilt: “I think that’s a pretty common response coming down here, feeling guilty for privilege and feeling guilty for not having challenged the white supremacy system. And I think it’s really good to feel bad. But…guilt is a wallowing kind of indulgence that doesn’t really help anybody. I hope that students will balance the idea that they should be very critical about why they’re here and how they’re reinforcing power dynamics even as they’re trying to undercut them.”

Third-time volunteer Aaron Shimeles is a black student who found his experience to be unsettling for different reasons. Despite the fact that race is “a social construction,” Shimeles said, he acknowledged that “seeing people who look like you suffering is a very compelling, motivating factor [in deciding to volunteer].” Shimeles related several experiences of racially-motivated harassment from white police officers while he was a volunteer with Common Ground in 2006 which made his own experiences of racism in his hometown of Seattle seem slight in comparison.

Professor Heldman also referred to New Orleans as symbolic for race relations in America, but said that with outside agitators coming in, now more than ever the power structure is “up for grabs.” But this doesn’t mean that the road to recovery will be any shorter or more easily won.

Heldman described New Orleans as a place experiencing the “echo effect,” the longer term effects of “post-traumatic stress disorder…economic depression, soaring housing prices” and an “increase in homelessness from 6000 to 12000 individuals per night” though in excess of 200,000 are still evacuees. The need to assist New Orleans’ residents is perhaps higher than ever before. The process is slow and often painfully frustrating. The first group Heldman led in 2005 returned a few months later to find that the houses they gutted had not been rebuilt; a year later, progress still hadn’t been made.
But this doesn’t keep students from [working], Heldman said; when students realize how long and hard the process of repair is, by and large they “buckle down” and do the work necessary, often changing their life plans to pursue more politically-oriented careers or spend more time in the city. Many students admitted that their desire to return was motivated by a feeling of helplessness and the need to do more, but both the students and Heldman also said that it was the residents and the city that brought them back. As Shimeles put it: “Coming back…is super-important…I feel a connection to the city. The people here are amazing. I’ve never met nicer people.”

“I really do think that people fall in love,” Heldman said. “I think students come down and get a broken heart and they get a broken heart from loving this city and seeing what’s happened to it. And they fall in love with the people here and end up coming back again and again.” As student Lara Bache said, “[Professor Heldman] was saying that the people of New Orleans will give you more than you’ll ever give them and don’t ever forget that. And it’s so true.” The students’ experience in a city with such deep roots may be one reason why students become more active when they return home. Aside from anecdotal data, Heldman said that pre and post-trip surveys reveal that students’ rates of “efficacy,” the idea that one’s voice can be heard in politics, “shot up dramatically” after their trip to New Orleans. Not surprisingly, the Occidental group is a tight-knit one which regularly welcomes new members.

Whittier and Occidental College students plan to return to the city this summer, when the colleges will rent out two houses to keep up the work and continue to build the community they’ve formed through working in the New Orleans one.