The UWM students who took part in last January’s New Orleans WinteriM posed in front of the Katrina Memorial with Cheryl Ajirotutu, associate professor anthropology (front row, far right).
The reality of New Orleans hit home for Jill Schaub in a classroom at Martin Luther King Charter School in the city’s Lower 9th Ward – the only public school that has returned to the devastated area. “I met a little girl who was 12. Her mother had drowned during the hurricane [Katrina],” Schaub says. “She was amazingly resilient, but that really brought home to me this was something that happened that is still affecting people. These children and their families are trying to have a normal life, living in FEMA trailers, still waiting for housing or insurance. Everyone else seems to have forgotten about them.”
“It changed my life completely.”
— Erica Lehr, sociology major
Schaub, who graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in May with a degree in social work, was one of 10 UWM students who went to New Orleans in January 2008 as part of a UWinteriM service learning course. (The second UWinteriM course in New Orleans is being offered in January 2009.)
Students pose with Valerie (front row, left) a New Orleans resident, in front of some of the iconic pink FEMA temporary housing trailers.
The course approach is modeled on the successful Walnut Way project, which brought UWM students and residents together to work on community transformation in Walnut Way, a historic African-American neighborhood in Milwaukee. “There were parallels between New Orleans and Milwaukee in the social and economic dynamics of the situation and the deep racial and community divides,” says Ajirotutu.