Three hours away from the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, a mini renaissance took place in a yellow frame house at 19th Street and 16th Avenue in Meridian. In its main room, Sweet Briar seniors Michelle Badger and Kerri Faust replaced light bulbs for a ceiling fan. Meanwhile, sophomore Ashley Figueiredo prepared the house’s back door for a sorely needed paint job, while her classmate Alison Carr was hard at work applying a coat of white paint to the walls of a bedroom.
Renovating an abandoned house in five days may sound like an overwhelming mission, but the 11 Sweet Briar students were unfazed by the task. They had journeyed from seven states to Meridian during their holiday break in January to work with Habitat for Humanity to provide homes for victims of Hurricane Katrina. Some had worked with Habitat before, some had not, but nearly all traveled to Mississippi out of a desire to help with relief efforts.
“I figured this would be a great way to go and help out Hurricane Katrina victims, which I have been wanting to do for a while,” said sophomore Carr, who traveled from her hometown of Bel Air, Md. The Sweet Briar group stayed at a local Catholic church while working with the Lauderdale County affiliate of Habitat. While it is rare for more than two houses to be completed in Meridian in a year, the affiliate seeks to build as many as eight houses this year to accommodate those displaced by Katrina, according to its president, Fonda Rush.
While the Sweet Briar group was not able to participate in the construction of a house, they did help clean up and clear a lot onto which a house would be built, and did touch-up work on a second house. The bulk of the week, however, was spent cleaning and renovating the abandoned yellow house, which had been left vacant since last July. There, the students trooped through overturned furniture, rodent infestations and a pungent odor to make the house habitable again. Carr described it as “a big undertaking.”
“We painted, we did a lot of cleaning out and [threw away] garbage,” senior Lauren Martin added. “We cleaned up the back yard full of glass and trash that shouldn’t be there, if kids were to go into the yard.”
Though the house appeared beyond hope when the Sweet Briar students arrived, the group was able to improve its condition considerably in the short time they spent in Meridian. “I liked the transformation of the house,” first-year student Megan Behrle said. “We got in there and we were just basically shocked by the state. And then by the time we left, it looked livable; that was amazing.”
While volunteering in Meridian, the group had dinner one night with some of the displaced Katrina survivors who would be receiving homes. Many had relocated to Meridian from Mississippi’s Gulf Coast and were staying in local shelters. “I was really glad to sit and talk with them, and hear their stories,” Martin said. “If we had lived there, we would be in the same exact circumstance.”
The process of revitalizing houses and clearing lots for future homes certainly wore out the Sweet Briar travelers, yet they still found time to enjoy themselves in Meridian. The group bonded over dinners, went to the local mall, and celebrated their accomplishments with a visit to an authentic catfish camp outside of the city. And while the task of renovating the house was difficult, the volunteers were content with its condition when they left.
“It was really satisfying to see the house in the beginning, and to know how bad of shape the house had been, versus in the end, when we had everything cleaned out and we had painted the walls — it really just looked habitable again,” Carr said. “Now a Hurricane Katrina victim can move in and can bring the house back into productivity.”
— By Katie Beth Ryan '08
