An Epic Hoe-Down!

Our work today at the Acorn Farm was pretty epic. 

Owner Wade Rathke and founder of ACORN is a resident driven to serve his New Orleans community. The all-organic farm provides affordable produce to the NOLA community every other Saturday. Many urban areas like those in New Orleans become Food Deserts in the aftermath of devastating events and circumstances; however, the Acorn Farm is a small yet effective way to counter this issue. Our task was to clean up the garden for spring planting. We dug holes for new trees, mowed overgrown grass, cleared fences, and wacked weeds. 

After all the hard work, I felt an overwhelming sense of pride in our group. This year, only about 20% of residents of the Lower Ninth Ward have returned to NOLA. The Acorn Farm may be small, but it makes a difference by turning land destroyed by Hurricane Katrina into nutritional value. Our Oglethorpe group is also small, but we also made a difference today at the farm. I'm proud of our team. We worked together, motivated one another, and succeeded the Ogle way!

-Christal Hayes

Day 4: Community Voice and Boys & Girls Club

Today we split our day working with Community Voice and Boys & Girls Club. For Community Voice we worked at the community garden. We cleared the weeds along the fence, shoveled holes for trees, mowed the lawn and cleared trees. This has been the most intensive type of work we have done so far but it was immediately gratifying as we immediately noticed the difference. Also working on this garden made me realize the importance of beautification projects and the role they can play as the community works towards rebuilding itself and attract its citizens it lost in Katrina. After finishing up at the garden we went to Fair Trade, a coffee shop that works with the community garden. There we met Beth Butler, a community leader who helped us understand the importance of community organization to combat the problems the city still faces.
Today was also our last day at the Boys and Girls Club. We helped them with their homework and finished the stations we had started yesterday. The highlight of my day was playing soccer with a couple of the smaller kids as well as continuing to help Justin finish his homework. I don't always like children and find it difficult to connect with them. But the charm and humor of this kid won me over immediately. He immediately found hilarious  nickname for all my friends and me. Meeting and working with these kids today was bittersweet as the interaction with them is instantly gratifying like it is to work at the garden but knowing that today is the last day with them and I won't be there to hear Justin call me silly names makes me a bit sad. But this experience has restarted my interest in mentoring and is something I would like to pursue once we are home again.



-Lizbeth

Contextualize and Take It to the Drawing Board

Second Harvest Food Bank and The Boys and Girls Club of Southeast Louisiana were our hosts today, and thus the day was split between indirect and direct service. This juxtaposition gave the group a chance to learn about issues of hunger and food distribution, and to talk to children and get an idea of what their dreams and joys were.

These two opportunities were incredibly fun for the group, but brought to light much more serious issues than if the food pantry would get boxes within the weight limits or if Roger the 2nd-grader was gonna make the freethrow. After group discussion about the meaning of today's service, we broke down the relevance and meaning of what we did.

Packaging cereal and grits can give us an idea of the sheer volume of food distributed by the Food Bank, but it can't begin to convey to us the experience of a hungry New Orleans senior citizen who took out thousands in hurricane relief loans and can't be certain where their week's meals will come from. These kinds of experiences are valuable to get the ball rolling and spark interest in volunteers, but our responsibility is to ask questions and learn more about root issues, both so we can understand the value in our service and so we can take these experiences back to Atlanta where we'll work to solve the larger issues that plague not only this city but our country.

The direct service with the kids at the Boys and Girls Club was fun for volunteers and for the club members. After talking to the kids, however, volunteers started to notice a disturbing trend. The older group of students, ranging from sixth to eleventh grade, almost all wanted to be professional athletes or a similarly sensationalized superstars.

These dreams were bold and brave without a doubt, but upon further questioning they had no basis in life experience or in the support systems offered by several of the students. Reflections of public figures in the media were evident in the pursuits of these students, and this lack of representation really hit home to me, as a media student. I should not be able to tell Jeremiah why the only successful black men he sees on TV are athletes and rappers. I shouldn't have to question Brian about why he wants to be an engineer like the Asian characters in movies.

I came to New Orleans braced to handle issues of homelessness and hunger and to really delve into the deeper issues surrounding those plights, and today caught me off guard, to say the least. Something about my feeling of inadequacy as another source of support for these kids just really upset me. Maybe I'm too comfortable in the ways I do service. I'm used to a volunteer coordinator setting up a project with clear cut objectives and goals and value, and a good time to be had by all. Today has made me really re-evaluate the way I serve and the way I contemplate what I see and do.

-Carrie

Edit 1: (1/7/15 2:40 AM)
I can't stop thinking about the some of the things that writing this made me feel. I appreciate my fellow volunteers and classmates, and my trip leader for his continued support and willingness to help me work through these issues by talking through them with me. I think the way I go about service is seriously lacking sometimes, and I need to majorly re-evaluate myself.

Boys and Girls Club Masterpiece

After having a productive time at the Second Harvest Food Bank, the group headed over to the West Bank Unit of the Boys and Girls Club.

Today we helped the kids work through their homework. They were all very receptive and had a welcoming attitude. We then conducted three science experiments, ran an obstacle course, and held a Kool-Aid foaming paint art station. Everyone involved had a blast! From playing with slime and using balloons to learn about carbon dioxide to dodging obstacles while beating the clock. Here is a portrait of our very own Stephanie Styles.

Miguel Montoya

"You're Always on My Mind"

This is Patrick (one of the Advisors on this trip).  I say that to preface that this isn't my first trip to New Orleans for service work before.  Four years ago, I had the pleasure of taking a tour of the Levees with a Geology Professor from Tulane University.  Through this field trip, as he called it, I learned a tremendous amount of information about why the levees failed, the decisions that were made, and the racial implications of these decisions.

The basics of his explanation of the levee failure in the lower 9th ward was that the wall was built improperly (too many issues to list), the wall was not completed in a timely manner, the flood gates failed because the power was out, and a barge was in the canal and likely busted through the wall. The further explanation takes around 3 hours for him to explain through various stops.

One story he shared, however, was one that is a common shared story in New Orleans. He shared how many residents believe that the lower 9th ward was flooded to salvage other neighborhoods, specifically white, middle class neighborhoods and the French Quarter.  He stated, with his expert analysis of the situation, that there was nothing of proof to believe such a story, but was troubling none-the-less.

It has long been my opinion that while I don't personally subscribe to that belief, the mere fact that the community has a distrust in the powers of the government to protect them from catastrophic flooding and destruction is a major issue in New Orleans.  I have always wondered about this story, and on Monday I had the pleasure to meet with a woman who lives in the upper 9th ward and subscribes to that story.  Her story of the storm and the distrust in community leadership is astounding.  It further exposed an issue to me that cannot be ignored:

How can a community be successful when they distrust their leaders?

Her final statement to us on Monday was that she hopes we tell the story and share that New Orleans still is rebounding and growing and while they have hope 10 years after Hurricane Katrina, that they hope we have not forgotten. So with that, I will conclude this long-winded post by saying that these individuals have been on my mind for four years now, and they will remain on my mind.

--Patrick