GW Students Spend Spring Break Volunteering in New Orleans

By Phu Nguyen, Computer Science undergraduate

			I spent my week of Spring Break in New Orleans helping the victims of Hurricane Katrina rebuild and resettle their homes. We had wanted to participate in the Katrina Relief Effort; however we did not get connected with the program until the Vietnamese Student Association’s partner – the National Congress of Vietnamese Americans - offered us funding and a point of contact. Four of us, Christina Wadhwani (Public Health major), Lisa Tran (Mechanical Engineering major), Janaki Umarvadia (Political Science major) and I (Computer Science major) drove down to New Orleans with the mission that we wanted to help the victims regardless of race and background. We stayed at Mary Queen of Vietnam Church during the week in New Orleans. Each day we were assigned different tasks. We got there by Tuesday night and Wednesday morning we gutted the home of a member of the church, and sanded down walls of a rebuilt American Church in the afternoon. On Thursday, we sorted and folded donated clothes to the victims. Again, on Friday we gutted out a victim’s home who lived in the same neighborhood of the house that we gutted out on Wednesday. We went back to D.C on Saturday.