For one week during winter break, Matt Peterson and Laneia Seumalo scooped muck, carted out moldy furniture, gutted waterlogged homes and heard one tear-jerking story after another in Hurricane Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.
“You don’t realize the full impact of what happened until you’re there,” Seumalo said.
The two University students joined students from more than 30 U.S. colleges to converge in New Orleans to help victims of Hurricane Katrina, part of a joint project between the Chabad on Campus National Foundation and Lubavitch Rabbi Yochanan Rivkin, director of the Chabad Jewish Student Center at Tulane, whose efforts have been praised by President Bush.
“You go into a house and find everything on the floor,” Seumalo said.
“It’s a mess,” Peterson added. “There is bed stuff in the kitchen, books in the fireplace and there is six inches of mud over all of it.”
Peterson said they went through about 25 houses in the seven days they were there, raking everything out of the house and taking sledge hammers to walls. The goal was to salvage the frame of each house.
“All these people had hurricane insurance, but they were without flood insurance. So they are getting no help financially,” Peterson said.
With each destroyed house came a unique case, but most stories were essentially the same.
“A lot of people said ‘I lost everything, but thank God I survived,’” Peterson said.
There was one man who collected precious Judaic art, antiques and Salvador Dali paintings. At one residence, an elderly couple walked through their home of 50 years, which never once had water damage.
One man asked the group to “keep an eye out for a snowglobe with a picture of my son and his ashes in it,” Peterson said.
“We worked the whole day, and in the seventh hour we finally found it,” Peterson said. “It was nice to give him back the one thing he wanted most.” Martin Lewiston, a retired surgeon, told the group there was no way, emotionally, he could have repaired his home by himself and that the group had given him hope, which he hadn’t had since Katrina struck, Peterson said.
Peterson said the hardest thing for him was gutting a 100-year-old synagogue and seeing the many Torahs, the most sacred of Jewish texts, that were ruined.
“It meant so much to so many people,” he said. “We listened as Jacob, a board member, told us through tears about his experiences there over the last 20 years.”
On the last day, the group buried thousands of Judaic holy books and objects, a ceremony as sacred as burying a person.
The recovery mission was part of Chabad on Campus’ ongoing relief effort. Chabad provides a variety of services and an open house for Jewish students and faculty on every college campus, said Rabbi Asi Spiegel, the director of the University’s Chabad Jewish Center. When disaster strikes, Chabad becomes an agency for helping all people, not just Jewish people.
“This comes from deep teachings of Judaism to help those in need,” Spiegel said. “The feedback from the missions have been amazing. We may do another one during spring break.”
Seumalo and Peterson both said they would go back if the chance comes.
“All the students came from different places and have different backgrounds, but we worked together beautifully,” Seumalo said. “But there is still so much left to do.”
“When you’re doing a holy job, there is no ego,” Peterson said. “You’re ready to drop whatever you’re doing to help somebody. The orders are given in a matter-of-fact way, maybe there was a ‘please,’ maybe not – it didn’t matter.”
Peterson also recommends to anyone that wants to donate money to go through the Chabad House of Tulane University.
“Every penny goes to the right place,” he said.
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