Baltimore Students Aid in Continuing Post-Katrina Efforts NEW ORLEANS, LA (wypr) - A group of Baltimore students recently returned from New Orleans, where they spent spring break helping with ongoing post-Hurricane Katrina rebuilding efforts. WYPR's Donna Marie Owens reports from the Crescent City.

It's a balmy spring day in New Orleans. Inside the Dragon Cafe , a soup kitchen in Orleans Parish, lively music plays and the aroma of red beans and rice drifts from the kitchen.

After Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in August 2005, folks began coming here for food and fellowship. Nearly four years after the levees broke, caf manager Stan Jahncke says many residents still need assistance with the basics: food, clothing, and shelter.

"If you live Uptown and you had insurance, you got a job, you're okay. If you didn't have insurance, you lived in the 9th Ward, you're not okay, cause you still don't have a house. I was lucky that I was fully covered with insurance, but a lot of these folks in New Orleans, especially people in the service industries didn't have insurance, and they're still out, without a house."

To help the city rebuild, volunteers have arrived from across the country, including Baltimore.

Wearing aprons and smiles, four students from Baltimore Freedom Academy, an East Baltimore high school, serve dozens of men and women passing through the food line.

Working alongside them is their teacher, Veronica Berruz, a third-year student at the University of Maryland law school. She's among dozens of students from the school who've traveled to New Orleans to volunteer over the past three years.

"We decided to come down here to help out with the continuing relief efforts stemming from the effects of Hurricane Katrina. Because there's still so much left to do. I mean you don't, you can't repair the devastation of something like that in four years."

Berruz, who teaches at the high school as part of her legal education, helped the students plan the trip and secure private funding. The experience proved a real adventure for the teens.

Most had never been on an airplane. Others, like 15-year-old Alexis Evans, had never traveled outside Baltimore.

"Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the 9th Ward and I feel as though, me as a volunteer I should come down and help out others. Because if that happened to Baltimore City, I would want others to help me out. I really attached to the cause."

So did Tearra King, 16, who explained why she wanted to participate.

"To help rebuild stuff, the damage that Hurricane Katrina did. And like to help the schools get better."

Besides the soup kitchen, the students visited an elementary school in the Treme neighborhood, where they painted, did gardening and read to younger students.

Another morning, they volunteered at a community center in St. Bernard Parish, and another day they installed energy-efficient light bulbs in houses.

Montez Shuron, 16, was exhausted by week's end, but happy he'd come.

"Because it's like a good experience. It keeps me active, as well as able to work with other people and meet new people."

Taja [Tija] Childs, 16, is eager to share her experiences with peers back home.

"We gonna write a report, we already writing journals about we doing, what we saw and then we gotta go back and tell our school how it was."

Sophia Berruz, a Howard County teacher helped her sister, Veronica, chaperone. She believes the trip will have a life-altering impact on the students.

"Their eyes are beginning to open and I really feel that they're beginning to see that there is more than just what's in Baltimore. And they're beginning to see the importance of what they need and what they want, and that difference. So I think it's very good for them to see."

And that may be the best lesson of all.
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