BY MICHAEL GLUK

In print | Published October 30, 2008

Four years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, many displaced residents are still unable to return to their still flood-damaged homes, and vital elements of the city’s infrastructure have yet to be repaired. While these rundown conditions persist, there is some worry that the country at large has forgotten about the city’s need for restoration. “I guess it’s because the tragedy has now become such an abstract concept since the damage no longer floods news reports every day,” Michelle Walters ’12 said.

Refocusing the public’s attention on the ongoing crisis is precisely the goal of New Orleans Week, a six-day program packed with events relating to the reconstruction of New Orleans. “We want to come in with this cultural perspective so that people can see how amazing the culture is,” Marsha Davis ’10, one of the event’s leading organizers, said. The week’s goal, she said, is to emphasize the human dimension of the infrastructure crisis so that Swarthmore students can realize that in helping New Orleans “they are affecting people.”

New Orleans Week offers a variety of activities that will encourage students to immerse themselves in New Orleans’ distinctive culture. Events include Wednesday’s Desserts of New Orleans in Shane Lounge, which offered an opportunity to sample New Orleanian desserts, a screening of “Shake the Devil Off,” a documentary the week’s committee describes as being about “a predominantly black Catholic church in New Orleans and its important role in the community,” and a “NOLArize! Dinner,” which will give students an opportunity to sample New Orleanian cuisine. The event will culminate in a benefit concert, the date of which has yet to be announced.

By focusing on the cultural aspects of New Orleans, NOLArize!, the organization sponsoring the event, hopes to personalize the problem of restoring New Orleans. Davis said, “This year we want to bring people the culture of New Orleans. We want them to understand why the cause of rebuilding this city is such an important one. For a people to demonstrate this sort of resilience and strength, there must be something unique and special going on. New Orleans is the birthplace of jazz. It’s a melting pot of all different cultures. It is a representation of the United States.”

NOLArize! hopes to continue offering support to New Orleans in future semesters, although the organization is not limiting its focus to hurricane relief. According to Davis, “We are not going to focus exclusively on Katrina because we want to move into the future.” NOLArize! was founded in 2006 by Marissa Davis ’08, Marsha Davis’s sister, who was frustrated with the government’s lackluster response to the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina.

She soon began the Katrina Relief effort, which led weeklong trips to New Orleans to help tutor and mentor children in grassroots community centers. Junior John Boucard attended one such trip in 2007, and has been actively involved in the organization ever since. “The more I talked to the students, the more I understood the gravity of the impact of the storm. From their point of the view, they had so much hope whereas we saw it as nothing but disastrous. They did not let the storm bring down their spirits,” Boucard explained.

This sort of interaction with local communities is central to NOLArize’s mission. “We focus on communicating directly with the community … listening to what they have to say rather than imposing [our] ideas,” Davis says. Unlike many trips that seek to provide physical aid to the city, this organization also seeks to “rebuild the spirit of New Orleans … [through] educational programs,” Boucard says.

Recently, the organization has undertaken a massive outreach campaign. Its members hope to establish chapters at colleges and universities across the country in an attempt to turn NOLArize! into a powerful national organization. The group emphasizes working with college students because, according to Boucard, “college students have access to abundant resources through their universities.” This expansion has most recently taken the form of a pen-pal letter exchange program, wherein one child from a family affected by the storm will be paired with a college student from anywhere in the country.

« RETURN TO NEWS

« PREV ARTICLE | NEXT ARTICLE »