Cal Poly students do good on their spring break in Louisiana
SLO Tribune 4/19/07
Goldberg and Callaway saw the continuing effects of the hurricane in person when they spent their spring break in March there, helping as tutors, food distributors and animal rescuers in St. Bernard Parish.
“We wanted to feel more connected in the aftermath of this disaster,” Goldberg said. “We’re so wrapped up in our own world here. But Katrina is still affecting people in this country.”
And to help keep the issue in the minds of local residents, the students have produced a 45-minute documentary they’ll show tonight in San Luis Obispo on the snail’s pace at which the rebuilding process is moving.
The fourth-year students volunteered for a week through the nonprofit organization Relief Spark. The students hope their film will
help bring some attention to the parish — Louisiana’s version of a county.
“There are just so many people there with no hope and no money,” Callaway said. “St. Bernard Parish was hit harder than the Ninth Ward (a New Orleans neighborhood). But the Ninth Ward gets so much more media attention.”
While helping, the Poly students took time to shoot footage that includes interviews, animals cooped up in cages, an abandoned school ruined by water damage, and a refrigerator still oddly perched on the roof of a home after being tossed by the storm.
The documentary is not all heavy in mood, though. It shows musicians on Bourbon Street in New Orleans and carefree scenes shot from the students’ car on their road trip to the South from San Luis Obispo.
On the journey there, Callaway and Goldberg joined four Cal Poly friends who volunteered separately in Louisiana through Ameri- Corps. The others were David Greenstein, Tristan Cheever, Jesse Bergman and Matt Landre.
Callaway and Goldberg spent this week urging Cal Poly students and faculty members to volunteer in Louisiana by setting up a booth on campus to increase awareness.
Cal Poly linguistics professor Aaron Nitzkin, who was displaced from his job at Tulane University by the hurricane, will answer questions at tonight’s showing.
Nitzkin appears in the documentar y and describes his personal nightmare of driving through a war-like zone to rediscover his neighborhood. That was about six weeks after the hurricane.
He talks about why so many people in New Orleans weren’t as prepared to evacuate as some outsiders assume they should have been.
“I don’t think anyone has quite recovered from it,” Nitzkin told The Tribune. Nitzkin told The Tribune. “The lives of just about everyone I know in New Orleans has changed. People changed jobs, moved away, broke up, remarried.…It’s a damaged place.”