Thursday, March 8, 2007
Spring break is a time to go on vacation, get that much needed tan and relax under the sun. But for Laura Holzman and Sara Koven, 2006 graduates, spring break involved much more than that — it changed their lives.
In 2006, Holzman and Koven spent spring break in Gulfport, Miss. They went with a group of nine KU students with the Jewish campus organization Hillel to help Hurricane Katrina victims rebuild their roofs. Though the trip was seven months after the disaster, the town was still completely leveled.
“It’s really different seeing a tragedy like that firsthand,” Holzman says. “I don’t think anything prepares you for what you see there.”
For Koven, the worst part was realizing the number of deaths in Gulfport.
“When we went to various houses to check if they were damaged, there was a number on each home that represented the number of casualties from that home,” Koven says. “It was crazy to see how many people had lost their lives.”
Holzman and Koven rebuilt roofs, demolished homes that could not be saved and built shacks from the ground up during their five-day trip.
“The whole experience is completely humbling,” Koven says. “We really realized how important time is and how important things we take for granted are.”
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