PILF Group Makes Emotional Hurricane Relief Trip
"We arrived at night. The casinos were all lit up, and everyone was commenting that the area looked pretty good,"
third-year Indiana Law student Katie McCauley Molter said. Those first impressions of Biloxi,
Miss., faded in the morning light. "We woke up the next day, and it literally looked like the
storm hit the night before. It was shocking."
McCauley Molter, Professor Amy Applegate, and 16 members of the Public Interest Law Foundation spent a week of winter vacation pitching in for Mississippi's storm survivors.
More than one year after Hurricane Katrina hit, lingering spray paint markers, splintered buildings, and battered spirits mark a region waiting - often on insurance claims, government aid, or physical oomph - for rebirth.
After making camp at Our Lady of Fatima convent, the team divided labor. Half of the group donned white suits and gas mask to scrub mold and rehabilitate homes as volunteers for the Hands On Network. Applegate joined the remaining students on a Mississippi Center for Justice (MCJ) crew that canvassed neighborhoods to inform residents about available services and survey them about the help they'd already received.
"Everyone had a story," McCauley
Molter said. With each trailer door knocked on, emotional storytelling about the tragedy unfolded. Many invited Indiana Law volunteers
into their homes. "It was very satisfying. We weren't doing research or writing memos,
but we were educating people in real need about aid and their rights."
"Although everyone I interviewed had a roof over their heads, they are living, for the most part, in difficult conditions, and it's been well over a year since the hurricane," Applegate wrote in the group's online journal.
MCJ estimates that thousands of families are living in damaged or temporary housing, while others populate a new segment of homeless poor in the state.
Applegate said it was hard for the crews to leave a place still in such desperate need. "It's hard to leave a place where everyone seems so vulnerable - we heard tales of people being defrauded out of the little aid they had received. It's hard to leave behind people who are so tired, desperate, and living in terrible situations, but so grateful for the kindness of strangers."
This is the second trip Indiana Law students have made to the storm-torn region, and students are considering a return to the area. Read reflections from the group's journey in their online journal.