“Also, a lot of our faculty went through Katrina themselves and had to redo their own homes – so it brought up a lot of emotions in them,” Otto said. “After they were finished they saw how much they could do – things they never thought they could do before,” Otto said, noting that those who were physically unable to do the “heavy lifting” lent moral support to their co-workers.
Encouraging teamwork
Covered in debris after waterproofing the underhouse insulation of his assigned home in Gentilly, Louisiana’s Edgewood Park neighborhood, Jonathan Baynham, an Ursuline High theology and psychology teacher, said he was enjoying the opportunity to bond with his fellow faculty members. The volunteers were deliberately grouped by retreat leaders to build collaboration among people who didn’t normally work together.
“We’re all underneath the house right now, so we’re communicating in a different way,” Baynham said. “At school we’re communicating, ‘These are the principles we want to be teaching,’ or we’re rarely interacting with each other because we’re interacting with the students – everyone is in their own classroom doing their thing,” he said. “This is an opportunity for us to actually talk to each other as we’re doing something.”
Baynham said the service day brought to life many of the lessons he teaches his students in their study of the New Testament.
“Most of the retreats I’ve been on (solely consist of) prayer and reflection,” Baynham said, “but sometimes you have to stop talking and start doing, and then you can have something to reflect on. Sometimes it takes doing something to have something to reflect on. It’s not just lofty language anymore,” he said.
Inspired by student crosses
At the pre-retreat prayer service, 10 students from Ursuline’s Peer Ministry group went to campus on their day off to help send forth the faculty-staff volunteers. One peer minister noted how the service she was doing at Ursuline had inspired her to volunteer in Guatemala and told the adults that Ursuline students would be praying for their teachers on service day. The peer ministers gave faculty and staff members handmade crosses, each inscribed with a different quote from Scripture.
“They said to us, ‘We know that you (teachers) have crosses that you bear, and we know that you are going out to try to help families lessen their burdens and bear theircrosses, so here is a (real) cross you can keep in your office for the rest of the year as a reminder of the families that you are helping today,’” said Otto, tearing up at the memory of the morning send-off.
“Christ is calling us to work with the poor, to work with people who don’t have the same things that we have,” Otto said. “It’s part of our faith to do something – not just to talk about things.”
Posted with permission from the Clarion Herald, official newspaper of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, La.
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