‘Voluntourists’ rebuild city by day, party by night
NEW ORLEANS – Wearing safety goggles and dust mask, Anita McClendon shouldered a rotten floorboard to the curbside debris pile and then, dirty and dusty, paused to smile. This, she said, “is awesome.”
McClendon, 48, and about a dozen other volunteers were gutting the flood-ravaged Greater Little Zion Baptist Church in the Lower Ninth Ward. It was tough, sweaty work, and for some of the volunteers, it was their vacation.
McClendon, a health care worker from Oakland, Calif., was here for three weeks, ripping down demolished buildings by day – and dancing to zydeco by night. She and thousands of other volunteers are combining work and play to help rebuild this devastated city.
This month, they are being joined by hundreds of college students spending spring break here and on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. The effort is dubbed “voluntourism,” and local leaders say it is critical to the rebuilding because it provides dollar-spending fun lovers and hammer-wielding fixer-uppers all rolled into one.
The more than 1,000 students expected here in the coming weeks will clean out houses and churches and day-care centers. “We’ll be slammed with people,” said Felix Wai, director of the Mardi Gras Service Corps, a nonprofit group supported by Tulane University, the city of New Orleans and other sponsors.
The Mardi Gras Service Corps is focusing on the most devastated neighborhoods of the city, including the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly and Central City. Wai said the group is trying to provide housing, schools, day-care centers and jobs. “Without those four fundamentals,” he said, “people won’t come back.”
The Web site VolunTourism.org points out that the combination of volunteerism and tourism dates back centuries: Missionaries, sailors, explorers and others performed social services while visiting new places. The modern iteration began in the 1960s with the launching of the Peace Corps. Study-abroad programs in the 1970s and ecotourism in the 1980s expanded the notion. Volunteer vacations, with organizations such as Earthwatch, took hold in the 1990s.
Mardi Gras Service Corps volunteers are expected to work four to six hours a day. They are relieved of duty in time to hit the town to eat dinner at an oyster house or hear jazz at a nightclub. The group even helps people find temporary lodging, which is rare in the city these days.
“We are housing a lot of people in churches and community centers,” Wai said. The group advertises through word of mouth and a Web site, www.bottletreeproductions.com/mgsc.
The program was scheduled to run through April, but Wai said it has been so popular and the need is so great it may be revived in the summer, when more students can come.