Katrina's Gift - Kyle McDonnell

It had already been a long trip, a really long trip. It felt as if it took us days just to get into the state of Louisiana, but we finally arrived at the airport and made our way to the job site.

I fell asleep in the van on the way there as did everyone else, but for some reason we all woke up upon entering what would be our neighborhood for the next few weeks.

Now I am not religious by any means, but I felt as if something woke us up for a reason. I quickly realized that the reason was that we needed to witness the true destruction that Hurricane Katrina inflicted. It was like waking up in a movie, one of those horror flicks where the group of lost teenagers ends up in a deserted town and gets stranded when their car breaks down. They spend the rest of the movie just trying to get out. Well, that was the feeling when I first saw it.

When the sleepiness wore off, I realized that this was not a movie - this was real life. This was peoples’ lives, dreams, businesses, and homes, and they were now gone. As for people, there were none, at least until we reached the camp headquarters.

At first it seemed like a prison, with barbed wire fences locked up tight and a big brick building with very little light and an alarming silence. Then we got inside and sat down, and in came Brenden, the warden, who gave us a talk that made us feel even more like prisoners.

Then it was finally time for bed - time to get into the cot. As I lay there, I recalled a statistic that the warden gave us: 29,000 homes destroyed in this county alone.

I thought, “How are we supposed to make a difference with that kind of number staring us in the face?”

Little did I know, but my answer was just eight hours away.

All of my life I have been building and working, whether it be in a sport, at school, or in the backyard with my dad on the weekend. I have the physical and mental ability to finish any job that I start. Just as the rest of football team brought everything they had, I offered my will- power.

I brought the will to work and help these people who were in need. I was glad to help these people but I was very concerned about one question: what are they gong to do now? They have nothing left of the life they knew before. How are they going to overcome this tragedy?

And then my original question was answered on the first day of work; I finally knew how we were going to make a difference - house by house. I realized this when I met Rosie, the 80- something owner of the first house we gutted, and she was nothing but thankful that we had come down to help her.

This trip was very special to me because it taught me things about myself that I never knew before. I had never done any volunteering like this and it opened up a whole new part of me. I learned that when it came to the work we were doing, nothing could make me too tired to finish the job.

Absolutely nothing could stop me from finishing what I had started. As a group and as individuals, we saved these people thousands of dollars by gutting their houses for free. This was extremely important to them, considering they had just lost nearly everything in the hurricane.

The most significant and rewarding experiences came at the end of the day when an owner would see his or her house and just thank the heavens that we had done so much for him or her.

Due to this experience, my vision of service to others has changed slightly. I believe now that in the right situation when you can physically see your work helping other people that it is definitely worth it.

One area of my life that has been impacted by this opportunity is my ability to appreciate. After seeing these people lose everything but still remain thankful, I feel that I have no choice but to be thankful as well. I need to be thankful that I am healthy and happy, and have a wonderful family and great friends.

In conclusion, I must say that the Hilltop organization is absolutely necessary in terms of service outreach. As a group, it is effectively creating opportunities for volunteers to reach out to a community in another state. Before I went on the trip I would have argued sternly that the victims of Hurricane Katrina would have benefited the most from our work. However, now I would say that we all benefited differently but equally from the entire experience.

We are forever connected to that community. Our blood, sweat, and tears went into those houses; well, maybe not tears because everyone knows that football players don’t cry. There was plenty of blood and sweat. We are forever connected to the people of that community and they are forever connected to us, so we all benefit.