At top: Jamie Powll (left) and Jeremy Angeletti; bottom row (from left): Heather Duncan, Kevin Butler, Justin Simmons, Nik Stice, Reagan Griffin, Caitlin Murphy, and Amanda Tate.
VIDEO:	Audio Slideshow: Listen to Heather's stories as she talks you through her NOLA pictures

“I knew I would be back,” says Heather Duncan, a third-year student at the University of Oregon. “I felt called to serve.” Duncan developed a personal attachment to New Orleans after spending nine days of her winter vacation as a volunteer with the reconstruction efforts following Hurricane Katrina.

On the flight back to Oregon she decided she wanted to take a break from school and spend an entire term volunteering. “I knew they needed people now,” says Duncan. Rather than waiting until spring break to return to New Orleans, Duncan decided to drive across the country to spend the next three months as a volunteer coordinator.

She felt she had a job to do, and at that time it was not going to school, but rather helping others. Duncan accredits it to God. Even though her faith was uncertain at the time, she decided to go back to New Orleans.

During her first trip she did a lot of physical work with the reconstruction, but during her second trip she only did the physical labor when other student volunteers were not there to handle it. In March 2006, during spring break, 10,000 student volunteers gutted approximately 4,000 buildings—homes, schools, churches, and even a grocery store. They cleared all the debris and damaged furniture, ripped up the flooring, tore down the walls and insulation, literally kicked down the ceilings and left only the studs of the houses intact.

The group Heather worked with did not charge homeowners a fee for cleaning out homes and removing the trash—thus saving homeowners nearly $5,000 each. However, because the service was free, the student volunteers were in high demand. Duncan recalls helping one woman gut her house. “It was hard to do it with the people who lived there. They wanted to keep everything,” says Duncan. “These houses were their lives.”

As one of eight coordinators working with Campus Crusade for Christ, Duncan kept busy with her share of responsibilities. “The Super Eight is what they called us,” says Duncan. The coordinators were nicknamed by the 10,000 student volunteers who witnessed the massive workload the coordinators were in charge of assigning. Duncan’s main responsibility was to keep track of the paper work for each student volunteer and to document where volunteers were at all times on a spreadsheet. At times, her job was stressful.

Since Duncan’s job meant spending most of her time at the camp, all the students came to her with their questions. She was also in charge of handling phone calls from local homeowners who needed help. Her cell phone was bombarded with calls from people who needed homes, or needed their wrecked home to be gutted. “I got calls every two minutes,” says Duncan. “That’s not an exaggeration. I had to turn off my phone before going to sleep.”

The living conditions did not help with the stress, but the benefits from being there made it all worthwhile. “We lived in a warehouse in the Lower Ninth,” Duncan said referring to the area hit hardest by the hurricane. She and the others slept on donated mattresses that covered the floor, alongside the cockroaches and rats—and often she would wake up with a sore back. During her first trip, because there wasn’t any clean water, she couldn’t wash her face or brush her teeth unless she found extra bottled water.

Even four months after the hurricane hit, during Duncan’s second trip to New Orleans, she still could not shower regularly. The bathroom was a row of portable toilets. Duncan was forced to quickly adjust to this uncomfortable lifestyle.  “You get inventive with your hygiene,” says Duncan. “I definitely took a lot of Wet Nap baths.”

The experiences she had in New Orleans are relived through her stories. Duncan explains that the students tried to remain lighthearted and played games in order to avoid being overwhelmed with the seriousness of the situation. “When I think of New Orleans I don’t think of all the destruction. I think of how the eight of us all fit in the peanut bag,” says Duncan, referring to a giant peanut bag (like the ones used in baseball stadiums) that all the coordinators stood inside of—for fun.

It has been over a year since Duncan was in New Orleans, and she still misses spending time with the people she eventually referred to as her family. “I went to sleep and woke up every morning looking at these same people,” says Duncan.

Looking through photographs she took while in volunteering, she says it is strange to think that she saw the destruction every day. She said it was difficult to return to her life in Eugene after three months of volunteering with the reconstruction efforts.

Duncan said she felt compelled to help after hearing about the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. But what made her spend an entire term? “I felt that I needed to do something. I didn’t have money to give,” says Duncan. The original nine days to New Orleans changed her life. It was during that first trip that she noticed herself accidentally attributing to God the good things that happened. She surprised herself when she found herself thanking God after feeling better when her back cracked. She says it made her think, “Perhaps I do believe.” Now, Heather Duncan proudly calls herself a Christian.

Damage caused by the hurricane still exists. “Some houses still have not been touched,” says Duncan. Some of the sites that she worked on have been bulldozed. The damage to those areas was so extensive that they could not be rebuilt, leaving people homeless and desperate. She says New Orleans is far from full recovery and still needs the help of volunteers. “Money is always helpful, but they need hands,” says Duncan.

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