Volunteer reflects on relief efforts

While many of our fellow students were spending mid-term break in the sun and sand, 46 fellow students and I heeded the call of the BonaResponds hurricane relief trip to Mississippi. This service trip abruptly turned into an emergency detour to Enterprise, Ala., which had been hit by a tornado mere hours before.Seeing all the crosses that the friars handed out as we boarded the bus before our departure was a powerful symbol for me, not just of us being a part of a group and how we all wore them trip, but how they brought us together, a sea of brown shirts and wooden crosses. We all had our reasons for spending our break here: our various backgrounds, hometowns and histories.

However we all felt the pull, like some hidden gravity, to come together for a cause bigger than ourselves. Even though we were facing a problem we all knew to be completely beyond our power to solve, that at best we will only be able to make a dent, all of us decided that was enough.

Our arrival in Alabama is something I know stuck with everyone who was there. Grabbing our rakes, shovels, chainsaws, hacksaws and tree trimmers, we marched as one, a sea of brown, and one could almost pick out the strains of "Onward Christian Soldier" on the wind.

As we came closer to the epicenter, our presence had a dramatic, palpable effect on everyone we passed. People were taking pictures, shooting video, pointing and waving as they gave a furtive Sign of the Cross at the sight of the Brown and Gold. Our warm reception was chilled when we turned the corner to see the stage of CNN's Tragedy of the Week for ourselves. What had been mere pictures in the paper and sound bites on TV was now painfully real.

There were times in both Alabama and Mississippi when I felt overwhelmed; I'm sure I wasn't alone. I was just one person, and coming face-to-face with my limitations as a human being was frustrating. But then I talk to the people we've helped and see their faces, the look in their eyes of sheer gratitude, and realize even if we haven't moved mountains, just being there was enough.

Randy May, director of Randy's Rangers, the organization that built and ran our American Baptist East camp, said a human presence is what many of the people made prisoners of Hurricane Katrina need more than anything.

"People don't need things," May said. "They need emotions, they need love, they need hope. Just our presence here gives people hope, that someone is out there trying to dig them out when they've been trapped, physically, socially and emotionally."

At the dining hall in our camp, there's a picture of a tree made out of hundreds of dots. Randy explained that like the dots, people by themselves are nothing, but when they come together and work as one, they can make up the big picture.

Getting back to those crosses again, I found myself wondering, "How many of these people will be wearing those on Monday? Next week? Next year? Will they be a personal reminder and public symbol of our cause, or mere trinkets, just another souvenir from a trip to be cast aside and forgotten?"

I hope not.

I would like to believe this isn't the end of a trip, but for those of us who were there, the start of a lifelong journey of service and compassion.

There's an after-school special about patience and humility in there, and ones about the power of hope and compassion too, but I don't want to give you the Cliff Notes version of our time down here; if you want to understand, you'll just have to get on the bus yourself.



Jason Schultz, Class of 2007