Syracuse, NY -- In the five years since Hurricane Katrina, Norm Andrzejewski has shepherded more than 1,500 volunteers from across Central New York to the devastated neighborhoods of New Orleans. The teams have put in long hours at more than 200 work sites and built three homes from the ground up. Despite the effort, Andrzejewski says the region still...
The girls varsity soccer team from Marcellus raises a wall on the second house in New Orleans that Operation Southern Comfort volunteers constructed from the foundation to the roof. Syracuse, NY -- In the five years since Hurricane Katrina, Norm Andrzejewski has shepherded more than 1,500 volunteers from across Central New York to the devastated neighborhoods of New Orleans.
The teams have put in long hours at more than 200 work sites and built three homes from the ground up.
Despite the effort, Andrzejewski says the region still has a long way to go.
“There are 2,000 homes in St. Bernard Parish that need to be worked on, and that same number of vacant lots in the 9th Ward,” said Andrzejewski, who lived in New Orleans in the 1960s. “We have our hands full. The job is not done.”
Andrzejewski made his first trip to the Gulf Coast in January 2006, several months after the Category-5 hurricane displaced thousands of residents and caused more than $80 billion in property damage.
“It looked like a war zone,” he said, describing blocks of homes with blue plastic tarps for roofs, cars lodged in trees and piles of garbage that stood more than 50 feet high.
He brought a group of 14 friends with him who spent the week gutting several houses and beginning the rebuilding process, wearing face masks to avoid breathing in toxic mold.
“Going back home, I remember we felt so good, so exhilarated about what we accomplished, but there was still so much left to do,” he said. “We’d cleared out one house, but there were another 50 houses on that street that no one was touching.”
He formed the nonprofit when he got back to Syracuse, under the umbrella of his home parish, St. Joseph the Worker Church in Liverpool.
Five years later, the volunteers of Operation Southern Comfort have made 29 trips to Louisiana.
The organizers figured out the economics — charging each volunteer about $200 to cover transportation and fuel costs for the 1,400 mile drive.
They made connections — with churches in Tennessee and Kentucky who have provided lodging halfway through the 21-hour drive, and in St. Bernard Parish, where volunteers are housed in bunks and share bathrooms.
Norm Andrzejewski started Operation Southern Comfort after Hurricane Katrina to help families in New Orleans. He's looking at slate roof tiles from some of the damaged houses on which the group has worked. The children painted designs on them, and they are sold as fundraisers. And they’ve done more than clean up houses. One project helped establish a shelter for battered women and children in a former apartment complex. Another one worked to restore two museums dedicated to the Islenos, the area’s first settlers who emigrated from the Canary Islands in the late 1700s.
This year, a group of Le Moyne College students decided to tackle the reading deficiencies they observed on their trip by organizing a literacy camp last June at a church.
A dozen pianos purchased from a music store in North Syracuse now have homes in area churches and in each of the school district’s eight buildings — where only one piano had survived the flood.
The group’s newest project has volunteers planting trees to help protect the area from future hurricane winds by serving as a buffer.
Volunteers range in age from high school students to 80-year-old retirees, who may have little experience in carpentry, electrical work, plumbing, drywall installation and other tasks needed.
“If you hammer in one nail, that’s a plus,” Andrzejewski said. “We accept everybody. You sign up, you go.”
During free time, volunteers tour the area to experience firsthand the amount of damage that the storm and flooding caused.
Andrzejewski said the experience is rewarding for volunteers and hurricane victims.
“The resolve we have is built on the backs of people who lost everything and still have hope,” he said.
“For the students, the experience of helping people in need is transformational,” said Morrisville-Eaton Superintendent Michael Drahos, who chaperoned a group of 10 students in July and is one of the nonprofit’s board members. “They feel the reward of making a difference, but also have a new world view.”
And the people they help feel that difference.
New Orleans resident Jerry McDonald said the group’s devotion has meant a lot to residents in St. Bernard Parish and the Ninth Ward of New Orleans.
“With all the other news, it can get forgotten, how many people are still without homes,” said McDonald, who has helped organizers from Central New York connect with families in need in Louisiana. “The help they have given, the work that they are doing is amazing.”
--Contact Alaina Potrikus at apotrikus@syracuse.com or 470-3252.