May 4, 2006 issue
Mountain Alliance Students Spend Spring Break Helping Alabama Residents
Story by Dorothy Goetz
Todd Nolt, director of Mountain Alliance at Watauga High School, first heard about Bayou le Batre (pronounced By-you La-ba-tree) from a teacher at the school who had met Haley Kuntz, a resident of the little town on the Gulf in Alabama. Nolt learned that the town had been hit hard by Hurricane Katrina’s winds and floodwaters and recognized that Bayou le Batre was not one of the hot-topic locations mentioned with any regularity in post-hurricane reporting. He also understood that the town still needed help.
Nolt’s job as director of Mountain Alliance is to search for ways that Watauga County young people aged 15 to 18 can explore and develop their leadership potential through experiential learning. A service project in this recovering hamlet during spring break would be a superb fit for the program. With months of planning and help from Jane Rogers, senior counselor at WHS, the details of the trip began to take shape. With Rogers’ guidance, the Student Council, the Honor Society and the Exhale Club raised over $1,300 to present to Bayou le Batre’s Bryant High School.
Nolt connected with the Mennonite Disaster Services (MDS) coordinator in the area to arrange lodging, meals and work projects and lined up chaperones Ashley Murray, Daniel Kadwell, Jessica Nolt and Mark Barber. Mountain Alliance members were given the opportunity to sign up for the week-long service project. Each participant paid a $50 fee to offset the costs of transportation.
At 5:00 a.m. on April 17, Nolt, the bus driver and a sleepy entourage left the WHS parking lot for their 653-mile journey.
With them, they took a blank journal for students to record their thoughts and experiences. Words of Edmund Burke were on the inside page: “Service without reflection is like eating without digesting.” As the morning sun moved high overhead, the travelers began to list their expectations: anticipation that heat would be a major factor, that they would feel hope for the region seeing so many people working to help, that seafood would be part of their meals and that body odor would be a predictable and unavoidable olfactory assault.
Bayou le Batre is known as the seafood capital of Alabama and for more than a century has helped feed the United States and parts of the world with local varieties of shrimp, oysters and fish. The small fishing village was named for the battery maintained there when the area was under French control. After the fall of Saigon during the Vietnam War, many parts of the Gulf Coast, including Bayou le Batre, became home to Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees. In the 2000 census, the 2,500 residents of Bayou le Batre were identified as 55 percent white, 33 percent Vietnamese and 10 percent African American. The average income for the population was $10,000 per person per year.
Late Monday evening on the 17th, the bus pulled into the parking lot of the Northfield Mall where MDS had set up a base camp for volunteers needing a place to sleep and eat. The students and chaperones stepped off of the bus into the humid night air and headed for their bunks.
The itinerary for the first day included an early-morning tour of the Sea Pearl Seafood Company where the students learned how shrimp is processed. After the tour, the group traveled, past lingering evidence of the destructive force of the storm, to Bryant High School to hand over the donation check at a baseball game. Then it was on to see their worksite and to get some work done.
By the end of day one in sultry southern Alabama, the students had rediscovered the joys of showering before sitting down to a meal. Their food was prepared under the watchful eye of a woman the group later nicknamed Cook Chop.
During the next four days, the 18 students split into three work details assigned to work on two houses designated for repairs. “Some were assigned interior work—trim work and painting, another bunch got into some roof work and the third stayed to help out the cooking staff,” explained Nolt. “The kitchen detail rotated so that all of the students had an opportunity to help feed the volunteers.”
Nolt continued, “MDS had been there pretty much from about two weeks after Katrina hit and had established protocols and a hierarchy of leadership that oversaw all aspects of the volunteer efforts. The United States and Canada were well represented while we were down there. We met volunteers from eastern Canadian provinces, British Columbia, Pennsylvania and Indiana.”
Breakfast each day was from 6:30 to 7:00 a.m. and work started by 7:30. Volunteers packed their own lunches after breakfast. Water was plentiful because temperatures were above 90 degrees daily that week, and even hotter for those in the attics and on the roof. By the end of the workday at 6:00 p.m., all were ready for a big meal and some down time.
“Students who had never wielded a hammer, a paintbrush or a steel scouring pad got to know those tools intimately, said Nolt. “With each hammered nail, stroke of paint or freshly cleaned pot, they became a vital part in the process toward the goal of wholeness for the community of Bayou le Batre. It was amazing to see everyone’s commitment to the cause.”
After dinner on Friday, the group readied for the long journey home. They had accomplished quite a bit and had learned a great deal without once sitting in a classroom. Thy had removed and rebuilt a roof, repaired a wheelchair ramp, finished a home’s interior trim, painted rooms and done kitchen prep and cleanup. It was hard work. It was dirty work. It was hot work.
One of the students, Tim, perhaps summed up the experience best in his reflection of the trip—written in both English and Mandarin—on the journey home, “Life is a big river. I give a little bit to water this dry land.” But before we are able to dive into the depths of his mature sentiment, this budding philosopher double bounces us on the board by adding, “I am just kidding. Here, there [was] already enough water.”
About Mountain Alliance
The idea for the organization began with a conversation between two local residents at Murphy’s Restaurant who wrote notes on a napkin. Jerry Cantwell, then a substance abuse counselor and the director of the Watauga Youth Network, and Jim Patterson were the two heads that were better than one in making the plan more than ink on a blotter. Cantwell had just been given a list of names of 80 at-risk kids in the county and instructed to do something with them. Patterson was a seasoned veteran of changing people’s lives through experiential education and Cantwell was up for a different approach to what he did. That was in 1989.
After their initial powwow at Murphy’s, the men organized a meeting at the Jones House with other interested community leaders and the organization was formed. Mountain Alliance celebrated its 15th anniversary last Saturday. Since its beginning, the program has had an impact on more than 5,000 students through its activities.
Mountain Allianceis a nonprofit organization based at Watauga High School that encourages students of all cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds to actively engage in extracurricular learning experiences and to become academically successful.
In 2005-06, the organization was able to purchase a surplus bus that has been used to transport students as far north as Washington, D.C. for an urban expedition and as far south as Alabama for hurricane relief work.
Each year, two seniors in the group are awarded scholarships of $200 each to help them pursue their goals. This year, Patrick Fuller received the Bill Herring Service Award and Abby Suggs, the Jerry Cantwell Service Award.
To learn more, click to www.mountainalliance.org or call 828-263-0383.
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