Students go to work for others

Most college students will be home this Thanksgiving, taking a break from studies, visiting family and filling up on turkey and stuffing.

But this week, a group of students from the MU chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ are giving thanks by helping others. Fifteen to 20 volunteers left over the weekend for New Orleans to help with the post-Katrina hurricane relief effort. They will deliver food to residents, help clean up two damaged New Orleans ministries — Desire Street Ministries and Bibleway Missionary Baptist Church — and continue to help clear debris and wreckage from the storm.

This is the second trip MU Campus Crusade members have made in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Jeremy Linneman, an MU senior, says that in the immediate wake of both storms Campus Crusade members offered to send volunteers to the Gulf Coast. With financial contributions from the Crossing Church and anonymous donors to cover food and gas, 29 Campus Crusaders traveled by car to Lake Charles, La., which Linneman described as a “ghost town.”

The volunteers “all had the same kind of spiritual outlook,” said Erika Carlson, an MU senior. “Our first and foremost goal is to take care of the physical need, that people have food to eat and clothes to wear, but much greater than that, they do have the desire to sit down and just talk about their life. We were trying to meet any emotional or spiritual needs that they would have.”

Linneman said he took “a lot of joy” in helping others, and that coming home was a difficult transition.

“It was really hard to leave the last day because there was still so much to do,” he said. “You feel like you could be so much more valuable down there.”

Linneman and Carlson didn’t make the Thanksgiving week trip to New Orleans, but Campus Crusaders from around the country have stepped in. Joanna Meyer, a member of the Campus Crusade in Boulder, Colo., said that the national organization has so far sent more than 2,000 students to the south to help with hurricane relief effort.

Meyer said that because people are starting to move back into the city, volunteers will be helping prepare for reconstruction.

“The devastation is much larger than you can even imagine,” Meyer said. “Students are one of the most passionate, energetic labor forces on earth. If we can provide opportunities that are compelling, the students will go.”

Other local religious groups also have stories to tell about their volunteer work along the Gulf Coast, and some are planning to return.

Ten members of the First Presbyterian Church returned Nov. 12 from a weeklong trip to Louisiana. Kathie Jackson, First Presbyterian’s associate pastor, said they began the first half of the trip in a warehouse in Tippitoe, La., organizing donated food, clothing and other household items with the local community. They spent the following day doing demolition and clean-up work of a couple’s destroyed fishing lodge before heading to a flooded area of New Orleans to distribute cleaning supplies, food and water.

Sheila Renfrow, director of youth ministries at Missouri United Methodist Church, said the church plans to dispatch a group of five adults and two dozen high school students in June. Renfrow said they are waiting until the summer because hurricane victims will likely need help years from now.

In fact, Renfrow said, United Methodist volunteers will be going to Mobile, Ala., which is still recovering from Hurricane Ivan, which came ashore in September 2004. Then they plan to go to Bayou La Batre, a small Alabama fishing town, to help rebuild and paint houses damaged by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Carlson, who was originally planning to go on the Campus Crusade trip, is happy that other Campus Crusaders are continuing in the relief effort that she helped initiate.

“(We were) just kind of looking for a new avenue of ways of what we can do to help since what’s going on down there is such a burden on our hearts, feeling like we shouldn’t just be in our own little college bubble, but we should be branching out from that and doing something that counts towards a goal on a grander scheme: helping people rebuild their lives.”