Restoring homes & hope -- and learning outside the classroom

Life lessons in the Gulf's living lab

By Stacy A. Teicher | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

NEW ORLEANS – They were strangers here a few days ago, volunteering to knock on doors for a community-organizing group. Now Liz Henderson and Kristen Kuriga are greeted as friends. Mary Solomon, a lifelong New Orleanian, welcomes them into her cheerful white house - an anchor in a neighborhood where the decay started long before the storm.

They are here to listen to her story. To record it. To connect. To help. To learn.

The service trip in early January was only eight days long, but for Ms. Henderson, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., it wasn't too brief to be "completely life-altering." Her experiences - ranging from gutting flooded houses to picketing a hotel trying to evict Katrina evacuees - put her on an emotional rollercoaster. But in the end, it confirmed her career aspirations: "Going door-to-door really showed me ... I'd like to do [a certain] kind of journalism - talking to people who normally don't have their stories told," she says.

Thousands of college students from across America have not only been moved by the magnitude of the Gulf Coast disaster - they've also been mobilized. Break Away, a group that coordinates alternative vacation trips, reports at least half of its 80 chapter schools are organizing hurricane-relief trips. More than 200 collegians have already traveled to the region for Break Away winter trips.

With guidance from nonprofit groups and professors devoted to the idea of service learning, young people are putting their talents to use in courtrooms and health clinics, at construction sites and elementary schools. As New Orleans and other Gulf coast towns reinvent themselves, many find it an irresistible living laboratory in which to hone their skills.

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