College students volunteer to rebuild New Orleans

College students have returned to New Orleans with a paint brush in one hand and a hammer in the other, volunteering their time to rebuild the city's damaged neighborhoods, houses and schools.The assistance students are offering New Orleans is taking a variety of forms after Hurricane Katrina.

Four days after the storm hit on Aug. 29, Tulane University junior Kevin Lander and three fellow students formed the nonprofit NOLA Hurricane Fund: Tulane students working to restore New Orleans. The organization now has hundreds of volunteers and has raised approximately $100,000.They adopted three displaced families (one currently in Dallas and two in Huntsville, Ala.) and helped them obtain new furniture, supplies, clothing, and schooling for their children. Another primary activity of the NOLA Hurricane Fund is to help get area schools back on their feet, like reestablishing the New Orleans High School for Science and Math at the Henry W. Allen Elementary School on Loyola Avenue. The NOLA volunteers renovated the second floor of the school and are working on the first and third floors.NOLA has also opened a computer lab in the school that will include 40 computers donated by the Baton Rouge- based nonprofit Capital Area Corporate Recycling Council. The students using the lab will eventually be given the computers for their personal use.Lander estimates that through December, he devoted 40 to 50 hours a week on the NOLA Hurricane Fund. Now that classes have resumed, he devotes 15 to 20 hours a week to his foundation. Before Katrina, Lander tutored students at Lafayette Elementary School.It broke my heart thinking about the kids I had worked with, he said. I knew in my heart I had to come back.You never know when you're going to be the one looking for someone to step up and give you a hand.Krystal Kofi, a sophomore at Xavier University, volunteers for NOLA and has put in roughly five to 10 hours a week to renovate the school.Helping other people enriches you, Kofi said.Another student organization that is playing a large role in rebuilding devastated areas is the Loyola University Community Action Program. LUCAP's budget was cut after Katrina from $25,000 to $15,000, but that hasn't stopped the organization from contributing to the rebuild.LUCAP's hunger relief program works with emergency communities in St. Bernard Parish to feed 1,500 homeless people a day, and the Let's Gut a House project cleans out houses in St. Bernard. LUCAP also does soil testing, bioremediation research and helps the Common Ground Relief with their Women's Center and Daycare Co-Op in the Lower Ninth Ward with food drives, clothing and supplies. We're covering as many bases as we can, said Wilhelmina Peragrine, a junior at Loyola. It's amazing how little is being funded by the government; non-profit organizations and small, grassroots efforts are leading the charge in helping New Orleans rebuild.Peragrine said the main challenge for the organization is gaining transportation to each project. LUCAP's van broke down recently after working in St. Bernard.While most of the students interviewed felt a calling to come back to New Orleans, Jason Saul, a junior at the University of New Orleans, never left the city, even during the darkest hours of Katrina and its aftermath. Saul worked as a security guard at East Jefferson General Hospital and stayed there during Katrina and for 33 days afterwards because of flooding at his home in Metairie. During the days following Katrina's landfall, Saul transported several refugees to the Interstate 10/ Causeway evacuation point.Saul has been pleasantly surprised by how well everyone is coming together without being asked. His rebuilding efforts have been in the Metairie area, assisting people with chores like painting and hanging Sheetrock, two activities he had no experience in before the storm. The more people know about how much volunteer work is going on, the more people will be encouraged to do it, he said.