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Third year student Shirley Torho (far right) with fellow students, all of whom took part in an alternative spring break; this group worked with the organization Common Ground to gut and clean the home of Joe and Linda in New Orleans's 9th Ward.
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Finding Common Ground
By Shirley Torho as told to Dimitra Kessenides
Shirley Torho '08 majors in psychology and minors in women's studies. Originally from Bound Brook, New Jersey, Torho plans to pursue a career in medicine and public health after Barnard-she's particularly interested in child development and scientific research into behavior. In addition to holding the events chair of the United Students of Color Council, Torho works as a peer educator with Well Woman, Barnard's health promotion program. She is a volunteer leader with Columbia Urban Experience and a member of Students Promoting Empowerment and Knowledge, a group that supports ethnic studies
within the Columbia community.
Torho recently went on an "alternative spring break" organized by Columbia's Office of Multicultural Affairs and Hillel. Students from Barnard and Columbia traveled to New Orleans to work collectively with the organization Common Ground in helping local residents clear, gut, and rebuild houses in the city's Katrina-ravaged 9th Ward.
Here, Torho describes the life-changing experience and how it will inform her studies and work going forward.
I was going to go to Germany for spring break because I have family there. Then one day, I read an email I got from someone at Columbia, from the Office of Multicultural Affairs and Hillel. They were organizing an alternative spring break to New Orleans. I chose to apply—this was something that was on people's minds, and I personally hadn't forgotten it. I wanted to go down there to see what it was actually like. The other thing that attracted me to this was that it emphasized coalition building between different student groups—Jewish students and students of color. For me, I haven't had that much insight into Jewish culture and tradition since I've been at Barnard, and this was attractive to me. I know a lot about other groups on campus, and I do a lot of programming and coalition building with other groups, but never with Jewish students. For me it was really the first time I'd heard Jewish students break themselves down into different categories—Reform, or Conservative. It was very eye opening because even within that community there is a lot of breakdown. And I think we tend to just group people together a lot.
There was training prior to going on the trip—eight hours a day on a Saturday and a Sunday before we left. It was a lot of community building. We talked about categorizations and how people group themselves, the types of tensions that can build on campus. It was the type of dialogue where people really dig deep, you push yourself to the edge of your comfort circle. The conversations we had were very intense, people were crying. And I don't know if it was just because of the group we were in, and people were able to open up and listen to each other. But I think we were all asking the right questions, and people were quiet when others were speaking, and we really made an effort to listen. I think the questions asked and the fact that people just sort of let go of all their stereotypes and ideas and let people in, that made a big difference for us. One of our discussion facilitators, Marta Esquilin, of Columbia's Office of Multicultural Affairs, she made it clear to us that we didn't have to say anything we didn't want to, and she emphasized the importance of a safe space, even when you try to step out of your comfort zone. This was probably the best thing I've done at Barnard, by far.
We also had speakers who came in. One talked about service and what it means to do service. It's complicated, because you have to question whether people actually want you to go into their communities and bring your ideas into their communities. Are they always happy to find help? The group we volunteered with in New Orleans, Common Ground, their mission statement says something like, don't help, don't come with sympathy, come with an open heart and work together with the community, as opposed to just coming and thinking you're going to make a difference.
Common Ground, even though they're in New Orleans to rebuild homes, they have a mission that incorporates social justice and working together with other people to accomplish a common goal. That was very reflective in our group dynamic because there were about 40 Barnard students coming together from completely different backgrounds to work together. We broke up into four groups of ten, and we lived together for seven days, and so in that scenario, you're forced to build relationships even if you don't want to—we spent 24 hours together every single day.
The work we did was gutting houses. We had our tools, every morning we'd go to Common Ground, and put on our Tyvek suits, these full body suits, and our respirator masks to protect us from the mold and other materials. A lot of the homes we worked in were in east New Orleans, in the 9th ward, and a lot of those homes have not been touched since Katrina, so the mold has just festered for about two years. You open the door and it just hits you in the face. It was pretty tragic because, for me, I felt as if I was in a third world country—I didn't think things like this happened in the U.S., where an entire neighborhood is just abandoned and no one takes care of it.
The best scenario there is the French Quarter, and everything's been restored. We were hanging out there a couple of nights. The stores are fine, the streets are OK, it looks as if nothing happened. On the extreme other end you have a home where it's sort of just sitting there, flipped over, and no effort whatsoever has been made to restore it or gut it, it's just in that state when Katrina hit two years ago.
The house I worked on was one of a senior couple, they're probably in their 60s, Joe and Linda, who we love dearly. They humbled me so much, they are so open and warm, they gave us everything we wanted. Common Ground provided us with lunches, and still every day at lunch Linda would give us food. They were living in a trailer and they only came back to New Orleans to clean up their home. Their neighborhood was close to a levee and so most of the homes there were run down, some of them have been restored, not theirs. On our first day, Linda was there pulling out furniture and these little figurines she had, and she was trying to figure out what to keep and what to throw away, and she told us that the only reason she came back was because the government said they'd give her an amount of money if she gutted her house by a certain date. Mind you it was like a small percentage of what her houses (she and Joe had three on that street) were actually worth. It's sad, but she needed the money and she came back and was trying to gut her home by herself. The way Common Ground works is people from the neighborhood just request help, and you're put on a list, and they go down the list. She just happened to get lucky around that time. We were there when she was—some of the other groups never met the people whose homes they were in, because those people had left for Utah or Texas.
Every morning we'd get on our tour bus, and we'd get dropped off at the homes we were working on. We went to drop off the first group on our third day. We get there and there's a pink notice hanging from the roof. So we got down—we were nosy, curious to read it—and it said, you have 30 days to gut your house or else this becomes government property. Apparently in the last couple of months, the city and the federal governments have taken homes away from people who haven't gutted their houses. They say it's a health hazard. And the sad thing about it is that most of the people they're sending these notices to haven't returned since they've been displaced to other states; many are still paying mortgages on their homes, they can't afford to return. That was probably the most emotional experience I had while I was there.
Stuff was strewn everywhere, there is a lot of garbage on the streets. There's virtually no room to drive down the streets, especially in east New Orleans because there's just garbage. And you'd think there is some sort of cycle, but apparently they come around once in a while to pick up; if not you have to call them. It didn't seem as though there was any real organization to picking up the trash that people were taking out of their homes. We were at Joe and Linda's home for five days, and this was five days worth of trash, and we just piled it along the street. And it was there for the entire week we were there, it was still there when we left. We don't' know if it's been taken away but it's been there for a while. There are trees tipped and fallen over, wires are hanging loose in some neighborhoods, I don't think some neighborhoods even have electricity yet. There are homes tipped on the side. Some areas you drive down the street you see patches and patches of weeds and grass because no one's been there for two years to take care of lawns. Or you just see blocks of land because homes were demolished or they were blown away during the storm.
The reason why I called it a third world country is not only because of the way the neighborhoods look but also because of the suits we had to wear. I almost felt like we were in quarantine, because Joe and Linda were wearing flip-flops and tanks tops in their homes, and we would go in these suits. That whole dynamic, that troubled me a lot, because I just felt kind of weird being in that situation. They live there.
It was really eye opening for me, because not only did we work with these amazing people, we were able to build within our own group, and that meant a lot to me. I can see myself sitting with a lot of the people I met and having a great time and talking. We have a potluck dinner coming up. We're in the process of finding ways to bring it back to campus. We're thinking of organizing an art exhibit of the photos.
I'm planning on applying to schools for a graduate degree in public health. I've always been interested in the social justice aspects of medicine but never really thought about doing anything with it. Currently, I work at Columbia Presbyterian in pediatric oncology as a volunteer. That was the pushing point for me. I work with little kids who have cancer. The first couple of weeks I had experiences with the social worker that was taking on all these cases for kids who couldn't afford treatment, and the neighborhoods they lived in weren't sound for their medical conditions. It meant a lot to me, and I didn't just want to sit there and not be proactive about it.
I heard from one of our tour guides in New Orleans that maybe about 80 percent of the people in there are clinically depressed, and on medication. That has to do with the culture there—the partying, the drinking—and then also with Katrina. The first thing that comes to mind is the interaction between people, their social and cultural lives, tradition and how that fits into medicine. It's very relevant to what I want to do. The environment they're living in now is not the best, with the mold and the diseases and the asbestos. It's also just affecting people's relationships in a very negative way. People are sick and dying, no one wants to live there anymore even though their great great great grandparents have lived there.
We're losing so much culture, and New Orleans has so much history. And people loved to live there, people loved the way they lived life down there. Now, they can't afford to be there any more, and it's not safe. We're losing not just New Orleans history but also American history. Being an African American, there is a lot of heavy African American black history in New Orleans, and a chunk of history, as far as slavery, is down there. A lot of it is just washed away because of Katrina. It definitely will be relevant for me throughout my life.
After we got back to New York, the first thing I thought was that after a few months, a lot of us are will probably not think about New Orleans much. Here we went, and we did something for good for a week, but did we make a difference really? The answer is yes, because Linda herself told us that had we not gone there was no way she would have been able to gut the house. But we don't live there, so how much of an impact can we have? But even if just one more house is taken care of—the more hands the better—you're giving someone the ability to retain something in their family.
When Katrina first happened, a lot of people rushed to get there. People now assume that a lot was fixed, and a lot hasn't been. People don't go there now because they assume it's OK. A lot of us are forgetting about it, we don't go there as much. I do want to remind people, because I saw the toll it's taken and I saw a lot of people really working hard to
get back what they had.
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