It has been nine months since that horrible day-into-nightmare of Katrina. It was Aug. 29, 2005, when the huuricane made landfall for the second time near the Louisiana-Mississippi line and changed so much for so many.

Photos by Tom Campbell

What took families a lifetime to collect was reduced to rubbish in a matter of moments when Hurricane Katrina roared through New Orleans on Aug 29.

Up and down the Gulf Coast, though, it looks as if it happened last week, not last year. Only the rains, the floods and the tears have dried. What remains is a hell on earth.

Trees that, literally, had the life sucked right off of them, look like trees from Dante’s Inferno, with bare branches ornamented by

strips of garbage carried by Katrina’s winds and waters to their final resting places, wavering in balmy southern breezes.

Homes lay flattened like a highway cola can. Others have entire walls ripped away, like life-size dollhouses with one side removed for easy access.

Nine months. Then something happened that was almost as bad as the storm itself.

Nothing.

Before the waters in New Orleans’ lower 9th Ward had even dried, Katrina and its victims had moved off the front page and off the minds of most Americans. Many continued to help with their wallets. But two groups of Purdue students and faculty helped with their hearts and their youthful exuberance.

“We’re making lives different at the neighborhood level,” says Bill Field, a professor in agricultural and biological engineering who accompanied one group as a faculty representative.

New Orleans has become the land of opportunity for businesses, not all of them legitimate.

Each week, fresh new faces of people with big hearts and strong backs trickle into the Gulf Coast region, everywhere from Pensacola to Lake Pontchartrain, with a strong desire to help heal a huge, unsightly wound in America that is incapable of healing itself.

Count among those fresh faces about 30 Purdue students and faculty members who spent the week of March 12 at various points along the Gulf Coast. For them, it may have been spring break, but it certainly was no vacation.

As a project for their Agriculture Systems Management 495 (senior capstone) course, seniors Kalen Bell and Kevin Wenning organized and secured funding for 17 students to travel to New Orleans during Purdue’s spring break to provide some manpower for the recovery effort.

They got a grant from Purdue’s Office of Engagement and got tools from their parents’ tool kits.

“This was very little money,” says Vic Lechtenberg, vice provost for engagement and former dean of Purdue Agriculture.

Bell and Wenning received a $1,238 grant for bare-bones funding of their project and got some additional money from the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering.

“That’s seed money, really, to get some of our students involved in a great service learning opportunity,” Lechtenberg says.

The Office of Engagement established the grants to encourage Purdue students to get involved with communities, nonprofit agencies, schools and government bodies.

For the better part of a week, “home” for the group was a community gymnasium on loan to the Community Church of Jefferson, La. They slept on cots and showered in the locker rooms.

Bell, of Colfax, Ind., spent a week in New Orleans as part of her hometown church mission in January. During the drive from Purdue to New Orleans, she tried — unsuccessfully — to prepare the students for what they would see.

“When you see a car crash on television, it has just a small impact on you,” says Wenning, of Greenwood, Ind.

“And when you drive down the road and you actually see an accident, it hits you a lot harder. You hear the crash, smell the burning rubber from the tires and maybe even hear the screams.

“But this … this is … seeing this is like being in the accident multiplied about 100 times.”