Brophy students serve in New Orleans

By Andrew Junker, The Catholic Sun
April 5, 2007

Bill Gannon couldn’t quite describe what made him travel to New Orleans last Easter vacation to help rebuild the city.

“I don’t know,” the senior at Brophy College Preparatory said. “I just felt compelled to go. You’re kind of numb to the things you see on the news, but when you see it in person, it just hits you so much harder.”

Last year’s experience led Gannon to become involved in a leadership role for this year’s New Orleans trip, which will take place April 9-15.

He and a group of 25 students, along with three teachers, will travel to the Crescent City next week to offer manual labor and engage in dialogue with the city’s residents.

Kim Baldwin, a teacher who works in Brophy’s Office of Faith and Justice, explained that the school tries to combine work with learning in its service projects.

“We try to always involve some contact with folks who are living in the community who can talk about the reality of that community and the different justice issues that are present,” she said.

Last month, Gannon and a few other students and teachers went to New Orleans to learn about the systemic problems affecting the area.

“The theme was poverty and racism in New Orleans, so the speakers were looking at how Katrina really brought out all those aspects that were covered up before Katrina,” Gannon said.

They discussed pre-existing issues like housing, medical care and education that only exacerbated the devastation wrought on the city by the storm.

By engaging these broader issues, Baldwin hopes the students will feel compelled to “seek justice” in whatever they do.

“While we have to respond to the immediate needs of people — whether that means feeding them or clothing them — we should also be asking the question, ‘Why are they hungry? Why do they not have clothes?’” she said.

“And then, ‘How can we amend that situation and how can we prevent it from happening again?’”

For some of the students, that means raising awareness in their own communities.

Logan Frye, a junior at the school, traveled to New Orleans last year and brought back hundreds of photos he had taken. He displayed them at a local coffee shop this past winter, and the exhibit will be at Glendale libraries in the near future.

“I felt that a lot of people had forgotten about the people and what happened,” Frye said of putting the exhibit together.

“I just wanted everyone to see the images that I captured to let them know that there are still problems here in the city. There’s still a lot of work to be done,” he said.

Frye will travel to New Orleans again this year with other veterans like Gannon, but there are also students going for the first time.

Junior Austin Pidgeon said that growing up in relative affluence made him want to understand the problems facing those he hopes to serve.

“It’s hard for me to make judgments on things like poverty when I’ve never experienced it,” he said. “So I wanted to go down there and see what it’s like and what’s really happening.”

Baldwin said that an immersion trip like the one to New Orleans can really change students who have grown up in comfort.

“It may not have even clicked that they’re from such affluence until they’re confronted with something so different,” Baldwin said.

“We hope that some type of conversion begins to take place, and the only way to do that is for them to have some type of experience where they’re broken open.”