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December 15 , 2007 - The Times-Picayune
Catfish and Hugs
By Bruce Nolan
Around dusk Thursday, their day's work done, the teens began to file into the spartan cafeteria at St. Raymond Parish in Gentilly, where the aroma of fresh-fried catfish wafted out into the parking lot.
They were not New Orleanians, but West Coasters from Santa Clara University and Cal Poly, both in California. More immediately, they had converged on St. Raymond's after laying tile in Harvey, gutting a house in Gentilly and painting another in the Lower 9th Ward.
Carol Boudy, Irvin Henry, Greg Dandridge and other parishioners were there waiting for them. They heaped their paper plates with catfish, peas and potato salad in token thanks for the work they and scores of thousands of similar volunteers have done for New Orleans families since Hurricane Katrina "It hasn't slowed down much at all," said Paul Cook, project director of Operation Helping Hands, the Catholic Charities storm relief program that this year has booked 14,000 volunteers into the city.
"We have 1,370 coming in between January and March," he said.
Thursday's gesture was not new. Grateful New Orleanians have been cooking for volunteers, lavishing them with care or otherwise expressing their gratitude or encouragement for two years, since the good Samaritans began pouring into the city from colleges, churches and secular nonprofits.
Teams from both schools were scheduled to return home today after a week's work in the city, said Matt Smith, leader of the Santa Clara team, the third one the university has sent to New Orleans.
Near the end of their stay, the students were still processing the city's wrecked but slowly healing landscape.
A few, like Alicia Ginsberg, 18, a Cal Poly student from Seattle who helped repaint a house in the Lower 9th Ward, were able to meet the family they were helping.
In her case, Gail Woods showed up and gave Ginsberg and others a tour of the inside of her still-gutted house.
"I guess we're doing it sort of backward, painting the outside before anything else has been done, but that's what they wanted," she said.
Still, Ginsberg said she was impressed with the pride with which Woods guided them through the empty house, showed where things had once been, and where they would be again after she renovated.
Talking to New Orleanians after just a few days, "I don't think I've ever seen people with so much pride in a city," said Shawn Khademi, 19, a Santa Clara student from Seattle. "They say they came through Katrina -- and they're still here."
He quoted another volunteer, who happened to be from New Orleans: "She said she'd lived here all her life, and she'd live for this city and die in this city.
"We don't hear that too much," said Danny Fant, another Santa Clara student, from San Jose, Calif.
Some said they were stricken by the continuing emptiness of the Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish.
When he told friends weeks ago he was headed to volunteer in New Orleans, Fant says his friends were surprised and a little puzzled. "They said, 'I thought that was done. I thought they were good,' " he said.
"But where I'm working in Gentilly, there are like three occupied houses on the whole street. And a guy walked up and said he knew of another house that needed to be gutted."
Boudy and the other parishioners at St. Raymond threw the meal in part because earlier volunteers had helped with renovations to the cafeteria, transforming it from an industrial-strength, post-Katrina Catholic Charities tool depot to a neater space where parishioners on Oct. 28 celebrated St. Raymond's 80th anniversary Mass.
The Rev. John O'Hallaran, St. Raymond's pastor, returned to the dormant parish to say Mass, the community's first gathering on the property since the storm. He was back again Thursday to meet and eat with his parishioners again, as well as the volunteers they fed.
Like nearly two dozen other flood-damaged parishes, St. Raymond was temporarily shuttered and its parishioners told to worship at another designated parish until an archdiocesan planning process could decide which parishes should reopen.
Boudy, Henry and some others are part of a committee working toward restoration for St. Raymond, although they have located only about 250 of 700 pre-Katrina parishioners.
In the spring the archdiocese will begin to announce reopenings.
"We hope we're on it," she said. "We want our parish back."
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