Online Story Contribution, Hurricane Digital Memory Bank
I went down south with 20 other wonderful people. Two people were from Florida, one person from South Dakot, one person from the U of M Twin Cities, and the other 16 of us are from the U of M Morris. I, being the only guy, with a bus full of 20 ladies, embarked on our \"Pay It Forward\" tour, that made multiple stops. We stopped in Kansas City (Missourri), Memphis (TN), Waveland (Mississippi), St. Louis (Missourri), Nashville (TN), and Des Moines (Iowa). \r\n Of these we did service projects at three of them. The first one we helped out at, was at a nature facility in Kansas City by writing letters to help that facility get more funding because it is a wonderfual place for animals. \r\n The 2nd stop we made is whwen we helped at a youth shelter in Memphis for kids who have been abused (physically, mentally, sexually) and who show signs of being abusers themselves. While there, some of us played volleyball while others did arts and crafts/games with kids that ranged from 11-18 years of age. To hear a kid say \"Thank you, we know that you didn\'t have to come here, but we are glad that you did\" makes all the difference to someone like myself.\r\n The 3rd stop we made for the projects was the hardest hitting one of all. We pulled into Waveland, Mississippi one night, couldn\'t really see a whole lot of what happened since it was dark out, and got to our camp at the iCare village. Our first day there all of us got assigned to go work on the beach of Bay of St. Louis, and help clean up all of the debris that was on there. We were teamed up with people from PA, Virginia, Iowa, etc and we went at it. We spent about 8 hours on that beach cleaning up trash, wood, bricks, etc anything that you could think of. By the end of the work day @ 3pm we had cleared a stretch of about 200 yards of clean beach from road to water. All of us emerged sandy, sunburnt, tired, sore, but to have a resident across the street come up to me and say only two words \"Thank you\", and leave, means the world to me. I know that we helped him out a lot. Our next day was spent working at a woman\'s home who lost all of her house. We started right off again just cleaning up debris and everything, then a bunch of us tackled breaking apart brick walls upon brick walls with a sledge hammer and two axes that we found burried under rubble. Others spent cleaning up debris, trees, branches, wood, etc. The woman that was there said a few things that touched my heart. The most meaningful was \"that is my backyard\", meaning she didn\'t know what it looked like since the hurricane and can finally remember the image of how it used to be. At noon, 6 of us were sent over to a different sight to help an elderly woman by the name of Ms. Lois, who lived in a double wide and that whole trailer had been hit and needed to be gutted out. Us mad people went right to work gutting it out with the help of her son (thank goodness for him). We cleaned that whole trailer out in about 2 hours (excluding the fridge, freezer, oven, washer, and dryer). We got those heavier items out when another group came to help. Everyone at the camp was impressed that we gutted an entire trailer in less than 3 hours. Ms. Lois\' next plan of attack; she is going to rebuild that trailer and live there.\r\n The rest of the trip after Mississippi was spent heading back to Morris, but also sight-seeing in Nashville and St. Louis.\r\n All in all it was an amazing experince that I had, it not only opened my eyes to the world, but also made me discover who I was, and I plan to go back sometime soon to continue to help. Anyone that can help should, because just in the month of March the number of volunteers is almost doubling the population of Waveland. If we continue like this we can help Waveland get back to the way it was in 3-5 years, instead of what people are predictin of 5-10 years.