The young church volunteers from Seekonk working in the flood-ravaged city are seeing a world very different than the one they know.

10:20 AM EST on Wednesday, February 22, 2006

BY KAREN A. DAVIS
Journal Staff Writer

NEW ORLEANS -- When Alicia Guerra wakes up in the morning, the first thing she thinks about is homework and school.

Journal photo / Kris Craig

Brynne Putney, left, and Alicia Guerra rip down wallboard in a church parsonage in New Orleans yesterday. The volunteers from the Seekonk Congregational Church are in the Crescent City this week.

After two days stripping and tearing down walls at a church parsonage near downtown New Orleans, Alicia, a 15-year-old Seekonk High School student, says she has a greater appreciation for the daily hardships faced by people here.

"If this happened to me, I'd be a total wreck," she said. "Being split up from my family, my house ruined, everything I owned lost-- my first thought would be, 'What am I going to do?' "

Hollyn Cote, 14, of Barrington, said she is used to waking up to a life where "Everything's so normal," she doesn't have much to worry about.

Both girls are members of the Seekonk Congregational Church, United Church of Christ confirmation class, part of a team of 33 working this week to help parishioners from their sister churches to rebuild.

The confirmation process lasts a year and is designed to raise the social consciousness of 14- and 15-year-old church members by requiring them to go to church every Sunday, then write about the sermons, to perform community service and to participate in class discussions led by the Rev. Marilyn E. Ricci.

This year's class began meeting last September and will be confirmed in June. The young people have sold soup and sandwiches on Super Bowl Sunday, held a rock-a-thon to raise money for this trip to New Orleans and slept out in tents to raise money for homelessness.

"They're helping us to go out into society and preparing us for the worst," Alicia said.

While these teenagers describe their own lives as happy and generally uncomplicated, they know now that life is very different for the residents of New Orleans.

Some of the older volunteers on the trip have described the life of a typical Seekonk teenager as sheltered from the real world.

They come from a community of roughly 13,000 people, which is very close-knit and where families know each other's business, according to Edna Bujold, one volunteer.

The day after volunteer Nancy Grandshaw bought her house several years ago, she was stopped in a store and asked if she was the one who had bought the McKenna house.

Ricci said the confirmation class aims to "unshelter" those who participate and expose them to the world that exists outside of Seekonk. The church emphasizes reflection, social awareness and personal responsibility in their confirmation teachings.

Journal photo / Kris Craig

The parsonage, in an inner-city neighborhood of New Orleans, and church, located one block away, were struggling to survive even before Hurricane Katrina struck. The Rev. Daehler Hayes, right, removes debris with a wheelbarrow.

She said some of the naiveté may have to do, in part, with the fact that there is very little diversity among the town's population. With little exposure to other cultures, the students may mistakenly assume that all communities are like their community.

Today's teenagers are sheltered within their own "little world" in any case, Ricci said.

The Camp Katrina teenagers and other volunteers were split up into three teams: two were sent to a middle-class neighborhood in the Orleans parish and worked to strip and clear the inside of one house and to replace a roof on another.

Alicia and Hollyn were part of the third crew, assigned to rip up the hardwood floors and tear down walls of the parsonage of the Central Congregational Church near downtown.

Most Crescent City residents were forced to evacuate after the hurricane struck the Gulf Coast region in late August and failed levees caused floodwaters to rise as high as 10 feet in some areas.

Six months later, many houses remain unoccupied and without electricity. Stores and other businesses have not reopened. And more than a few damaged rooftops are still covered with the blue tarps that the Federal Emergency Management Agency began installing in September.

The church and parsonage, which are one block apart, are located in an inner-city neighborhood that struggled economically even before Katrina hit.

Yesterday, with so many stores still closed, Pastor Wilmer Brown had to think a moment to come up with a nearby store where he could buy bottled water for the Seekonk volunteers.

"Is Winn-Dixie open?" he wondered.

"No, that's closed," he concluded.

This New Orleans trip has given the confirmation class a new way of looking at their own lives.

"After this, I'm never going to complain about anything again," Hollyn declared. "You think you know stuff, but then you learn so much stuff."

"I felt like I needed to help," Alicia said of her reason for making the commitment to the trip, including raising the $350 per person fee for the bus, food and lodging at a small church outside the city.

Hollyn said she had seen the devastation on TV, but after arriving in New Orleans, she found that the challenge for families is "about regaining everything,not just your house, but, like, the entire neighborhood. Everything is destroyed, so you have to start over."

Confirmation student Ryan Sousa, 14, of Seekonk, said the trip to New Orleans has definitely given him and his peers a greater appreciation for what they have and serves as a reminder that "You could lose everything you have in an instant."

kdavis@projo.com / (401) 277-7353

MULTIMEDIA: See more photos of the church group's activities and audio reports from Journal staffers Kris Craig and Karen Davis, who are traveling with the church group, at:

http://projo.com/campkatrina