Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
VOLUNTOURISM GROUPS
rebuild the big easy
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
We work 9 to 3, then shower and walk into the French Quarter. We have
our stools reserved now at the Crescent City Brewhouse. Every afternoon
we look at each other and say, “This was a good idea.”
—Fred Schenck and Makoto Ogura, volunteers with ACORN
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Unless you've been in a cave, you know that on August 29, 2005, the greatest natural
disaster in U.S. history occurred in southeast Louisiana. Hurricane Katrina ripped families to
pieces, destroyed homes, took lives, and shook our social order to the very core.
What Katrina couldn't demolish was the will of a great American city.
New Orleans looks different today. In many places, it's still a surreal landscape with
splintered houses and moldy rubble. But amid that bleak landscape, a new brand of grassroots
service organization has sprung up. In fact, New Orleans is giving whole new meaning to the
term “voluntourism.”
Frustrated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency's foot-dragging, government
gridlock, and the mess they saw on their TV screens, voluntourists began showing up soon
