Mansfield High's Gulf Coast Relief Reaching Out

It may be hard to believe, but Hurricane Katrina cleanup is still going on in Louisiana, and Mansfield High School students have answered the call.

For more than three years now, the Mansfield High School Gulf Coast Relief Group has gone on trips to help clean up the damage, demolish old and unusable buildings and rebuild.

Mansfield High School teacher Deb Fournier is organizing this year’s trip. The 15 students will be staying at St. Stanislaus School in Bay St. Louis.

Former Mansfield teacher Kathy Lichfield started the program in 2008, and the first group consisted of about 30 students in two separate trips. Sam Wisel was one of those students.

"We toured the area and it was just an absolute disaster," he said in a previous Patch article. "It was really creepy. They were still in the cleanup phases (two years after the hurricane), and they hadn't even started the rebuilding phase, which they're doing now. They've come a long way since then... but they still need help. There are people there that still have nothing."

Lichfield left MHS because of that first trip, and is now working in Louisiana to continue cleanup efforts in the region.

This year the group still has a lot of work ahead of them. The work begins after the 15 students sign up. The students have paid for their own airfare and do fund raising throughout the year to help pay for their meals and lodging.

Fournier said that the trip is always worth it, because they do good work and create bonds that they would have likely never made in school.

“It’s something that once you go, once you experience it, it’s very life altering,” she said.

Currently, the group does one trip a year. One of their trips included going to Waveland in 2009, when Lichfield left teaching. Waveland was a community that was particularly devastated.

“Waveland was a small community of people who mostly worked in the arts,” she said. “It’s a seaside community much like those you’d find on Cape Cod. This was the community, at that point, that was wiped clean. There were only 35 inhabitable houses when we got there.”

One of the streets the group worked on there was completely devoid of houses. The group was mainly focused on debris removal.

“We cleared a lot of lots,” she said. “It’d be funny, we’d be walking on cement and you’d suddenly realize, ‘wow, I’m standing in the kitchen or the bathroom, you know but there’s no house here.’”

During the trips, students found ways to take their minds off the devastation that, even after three or four years after the hurricane itself, still marred the landscape. They would find and collect “Katrinkits.”

“There were Mardi Gras necklaces everywhere because people had them in their homes and their attics,” Fournier said. “We would find the bead necklaces in the debris. You just find things, forks or a spoon or a plate, a little cross; nothing of value but they were pieces of peoples lives that were scattered.”

Fournier said she saw a definite change in the students themselves. Students that were, as she said, in their own clicks or groups before their trip now integrated with each other. She (and Wisel) said that the bonds formed on those trips last long after the trips were finished.

“You can do volunteer efforts in Mansfield, there’s plenty of things to do in our own community,” she said. “I think it is important to help your own community as well, but there’s something about bringing kids out of their comfort zone to do work for other people. There’s a powerful lesson there. It’s been a real incredible gift for me to be able to do this.”

This year the group will be heading out on April 16 to continue the work Lichfield started. Students going this year include Forrest Holmes, Dan Caughey, Danielle Koury, Brooke Waugh, BridgetMcCarthy, Brendan Murphy, Mariah Scott, Shannon Keohane, David Polutchko, Conor Monks, Angela Piro, Maria Platsidakis, Stephanie Crowley, Dan Caughey and Susan Jenkins.

Click and print out a form to the right if you would like to donate to the Mansfield Gulf Coast Relief Group.

There are also other fundraisers leading up to the trip, including:

February 11th and 12th : canning at Stop and Shop, Mansfield

March 16th public donations dropoff for yard sale: lobby at MHS

March 17th: Spring Cleaning Yard Sale: 9am to 3pm

March 22nd: tentative date for Chili’s dine out night in Plainville, near Target