Group of PC students and alumni helps with Hurricane Katrina relief during holiday break

"I couldn't believe I had just left Bourbon Street or the French Quarter not 10 minutes before. There was just nothing there. This was a year and a half after the storm," PC junior Ben Garden said about a trip he took to New Orleans' Ninth Ward.

"There were power lines dangling from telephone poles. The thing that struck me the most was the only sign of life in the vast majority of these houses, all that showed that there had ever even been any life there, was a red X and a number written on the houses."

Building inspectors painted red X's on houses that are unsafe to enter and may collapse. The number stands for the number of people found dead in the houses following Hurricane Katrina.

Garden returned to the site almost a year later to help more. He, along with Spenser Hardee, Steven Knotts, David Powers, Matthew Ruffner, Billy Schilling, and Michael Wright, spent five days in New Orleans. They worked with Desire Street Ministries, an organization formed in 1990 to help serve residents of the city's poor Upper Ninth Ward. Today, the organization, headed by '96 Heisman Trophy winner Danny Wuerffel, spends much of its time with Hurricane Katrina relief.

That the group - some PC students, others PC alumni - spent part of their holiday break working is a non-issue. According to all seven, the time was well-spent as they helped many who have lost nearly everything.

"Whatever we do is menial in the grand scheme of things," Wright said, "but it impacts every one of us."

Wright and the group chose to contact Desire Street Ministries because he enjoys working with them, having worked with them before. Shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit, former PC chaplain David Lindsay arranged for a group of students to help with the relief effort. Wright, Ruffner, and Powers went on the trip.

The volunteers from PC worked mainly on St. Roch Community Church, a new multi-congregational church in the St. Roch and St. Claude neighborhoods of New Orleans' Eighth Ward. They painted rooms and tore off some of the vinyl siding on the outside of the building that used to be a corner grocery store. During their stay, they also helped organize a Christmas store.

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