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03/30/2006: "Crofton native enjoys time 'cleaning up' in Louisiana"

“If you didn’t believe in God before, you do when you see what people are doing down there.”
For 24-year-old Crofton native Courtney Nohr, an off-hand suggestion by a classmate turned into what she now describes as “the most fun I’ve ever had.”
The daughter of Ron Nohr and Kyle Nohr, both of Crofton, a senior at the University of Nebraska in Omaha (UNO) majoring in elementary education, spent her spring break in the New Orleans area as a volunteer helping with the relief and cleanup efforts. The experience touched Courtney in a way she’d never been touched before, and she is planning a return trip to the storm-devastated region.
“It looked like a bomb had ripped through it,” she noted. “It was like a Third World country, there’s so much destruction, junk and devastation.”

“I don’t really want this article to be about me,” she noted Sunday evening when she sat down with Journal editor Kevin Henseler. “There is a huge need for volunteers to help down there.”
“It’s really sad because the news reports never show anything about the cleanup now; it’s like they aren’t interested in what’s really needed down there,” Courtney stated. “It is a long ways from being completed down there. I mean, there’s no way they can start rebuilding because every home needs to be gutted and all the garbage and junk needs to be thrown away.”
Courtney almost missed what she refers to as “the trip of a lifetime.”
“I was all ready to go off to spring break and just party the week away,” Courtney recalled, “when a girl I only knew because she was in a class with me, told me about the spring break trip she was taking and said, ‘You should check it out and come along.’” Courtney looked over the brochure, and decided she was more interested in the trip to Louisiana.
As it turned out, the girl, Kelly Moffet, who is from Minnesota, was going with the Campus Crusade organization, an eccumenical Christian student group that has a chapter on the UNO campus, to volunteer for cleanup work.
“The more I read about the trip, the more I wanted to go,” Courtney noted. “I wasn’t even a member of the Campus Crusade, but I decided to go with them.”
So two weeks ago, after paying $150 fees to help cover the gas and meal costs of the trip there and back, 65 students from UNO and the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, piled into vans and headed south for an 18-hour trip that would place them smack-dab in the center of the Hurricane Katrina destruction zone.
“We had signs on the windows of our vans saying, ‘Katrina Relief. Headed for New Orleans,’ and people would see that on the road and give us thumbs up,” Courtney stated. “Or if we were parked somewhere, they’d come up and give us money and tell us how proud they were of us.”
The group joined about 74 other college students at a Lutheran church in Slidell, a suburb of New Orleans, where they set up home base, sleeping in the pews and on the floors ... except Courtney.
“I pulled eight chairs together and made a bed out of them,” she laughed.
Working with the relief organization Operation Blessing, which coordinates the relief and cleanup efforts of volunteer groups in the New Orleans region, the students were broken into groups of 12-16 people.
“Each night, we’d meet with Operation Blessing people, and they’d hand out work assignments for the next day,” Courtney explained. Her group had a rare assignment, as they spent almost the entire week working on one house in St. Bernard Parish. They were assigned to clean up a house owned by a woman whose husband had died only 10 days before the group’s arrival from cancer. The woman had a teenage son. They were living in a FEMA trailer close to their house.
Courtney’s team spent 278 hours that week gutting the house and trying to salvage whatever they could of their woman’s personal possessions. By gutting, it meant tearing everything out right down to the wall studs and rafters.
Because of the wind and water from the hurricane, most homes suffer not only from rotting insulation, but they have high mold count. In fact, the worry of mold is so intense that cleanup crews must wear air purification masks while working.
But tearing out moldy insulation, water-logged furniture and sorting through possessions is one thing, but the volunteers also encounter all kinds of animals that have taken refuge in these devastated homes, including lizards and poisonous snakes.
“It was 85-90 degrees there everyday, and the humidity was terribly high,” Courtney remembered. “And we had to eat those ready-made meals that the military guys eat ... yuck!”
“There are groups from all over coming in to help,” Courtney pointed out. While her group was there, a contingent of high school students from Texas as well as other college groups were there. She said that groups from other Nebraska colleges such as Doane, Dana and Kearney were going to arrive the week after the UNO-UNL group’s visit.
A couple times during their stay, the group got to take tours through other devastated areas, just to see the damage. They saw the area where the levees broke, dumping millions of gallons of water into the city.
“The houses have things spray painted on them, like ‘Alive!’ or ‘Checked. 2 Dead,’” Courtney explained. “If a FEMA team or Army team had been through an area, they painted messages on the houses about what they found. Other houses, the owners would spray paint their phone numbers on the outside, so crews would check with them to see what they wanted done with their homes.”
Courtney said the woman whose house they were working on, told them of the nightmare troubles she has been having with her insurance company. The insurance companies are telling people that while they were insured for flood damage, they are blaming the hurricane winds for the damage to their homes, and refusing to pay coverage for repairs.
“But despite all her financial troubles,” Courtney said softly, “that lady would fix us lunch every day we worked on her place.”
Courtney’s group hauled tons of debris out of the house. She said that everything they removed from the house was hauled out and left alongside the street. Eventually, crews will come by and haul the junk away -- but the problem is, no one knows where to take the massive amount of storm-damaged junk, so it remains outside the homes.
“Out of all the stuff we hauled out of this lady’s house, we were only able to salvage 20 things,” Courtney recalled.
One item that was salvaged was one of her husband’s shirts, the only piece of clothing that was salvagable. “She said it was the shirt he’d really wanted to be buried in,” Courtney said.
“You know, it was really sad,” Courtney said. “There it was, 30 or more years of memories lying piled on the street in front of her house, and that lady was so grateful and giving toward us. Geez, it was her life that was piled up out there, and she was glad we were helping her clean it up.”
One instant, Courtney and some others were hauling a refrigerator out of the house, and the door popped open. “All this food that had been sitting in that fridge for the last 6-8 months came dumping out,” Courtney recalled with a sour look on her face. “One girl ran out and puked. We all lost it!”
She told of a time she was carrying a ceiling-hung lamp out of the house, and a part of it broke, dumping rotten water all over her. She said the smell was horrible.
“But you know what,” Courtney said with a big grin. “In spite of the snakes, the rotten water, old food, and the other stuff, it really was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.”
She said what made the trip so much “fun” was to be able to see what is being accomplished and how God’s presence is so immense in such a horribly devastated place.
In fact, Courtney said she had so much fun, she’s planning on organizing another trip to Louisiana for this summer, and she’s hoping to take group there next fall.
“There is so much work that needs to be done down there, and they need a lot of people to get it done before they can ever hope to start rebuilding,” she described. Courtney expressed irritation at the news media that made a big deal about Mardi Gras going on despite the storm damage. “That was such a tiny little part of New Orleans; and yeah, I know it shows that progress is being made, but out in the residential areas, there is a huge, huge need for more help, that I found myself wishing they would have shown that.”
Courtney will be working through Operation Blessing to organize a summer trip to New Orleans. She said people interested in accompanying her should email her at cnohr@yahoo.com. She also said anyone wanting more information about Operation Blessing can check out their website at www.ob.org.
She is also planning on getting more involved in the UNO chapter of Campus Crusade. And she hopes, through them, to put a fall trip down south together.
“It really is a blessing to those people when volunteers come down there and work,” she explained. “I am so glad I went that direction south for my spring break, and not somewhere else. I’m glad God changed the way I look at people, too.”