B&B Members Help Mississippi Farmers Rebuild after Katrina

By: Jamie Creamer

They’d been out all day, clearing land and building fences. They were dog tired and, to be honest, every one of them could have used a long, hot shower. And now they were cooped up in a van, with 350 miles of blacktop stretching between them and home.

Even so, you couldn’t have found a livelier, more upbeat bunch than the group of AU Block and Bridle Club members riding from south Mississippi back to Auburn that November Saturday night.

“It’s hard to describe just how good we all felt,” David Daniel, a junior in animal sciences, says. “We’d gone down there and accomplished a lot that you could see. It was like we’d made a difference.”

And indeed they had. The five students and club sponsor Dale Coleman had spent the day helping farm victims of Hurricane Katrina recover from the storm. For all, it was, if not a life-changing experience, then at least an eye-opening encounter with reality.

“We’d all seen on the news what Katrina had done down there, but being there and seeing it firsthand, that was powerful,” animal sciences senior Callie Nunley says. “It made you understand better just how much these people are going through.”

The weekend trek to the hurricane-ravaged region trip was set up by Jane Parish, who is on the animal and dairy sciences faculty at Mississippi State University.

“She contacted us and said a group of them were going, if any of us were interested,” Block and Bridle member Kevin Bowers says. “As soon as I heard about it, I was ready.”

The same was true for Nunley.

“For me personally, I’m a college student and back right after Katrina, when everybody else was making monetary contributions to the relief effort, I didn’t have the money to donate,” Nunley says. “Helping out in a hands-on way was my way of giving.”

“It was better than sending money,” Bowers says.

Coleman and company spent Friday night at a Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief camp in Poplarville, Miss., then got up early Saturday morning, split into work groups with the crew Parish had brought from Mississippi State and headed out. The host farmers provided all equipment and materials. The college students just had to ante up the time and the man- and womanpower.

AU’s animal sciences department picked up the tab for fuel for the trip

In the days before the trip, organizers had done their homework and had identified farmers with bona fide needs. Bowers’s host farm family, for instance, was an elderly couple, the husband of which had recently had a heart attack. And while the farmer Jena Smith and Daniel went to work with was middle-aged, he had extensive damage.

“He hasn’t even been able to hire anybody to help him because everybody else is cleaning up on their own place,” Daniel says.

The farmers were deeply grateful for the students’ labors, and in the span of just a few short hours, bonds were formed.

“The couple our team went to help was elderly, and they fell in love with Nick (Patterson, the fifth member of the AU group),” Nunley says. “In fact, they decided they had a granddaughter he needed to marry.”

If the five AU students had to do it over again, they say they’d head back to the Gulf Coast in a heartbeat. In fact, they’re hoping for that chance.

“There’s so much to be done down there, it’s unbelievable,” Nunley says. “I definitely want to go back.”

Bowers agrees.

“Just name the date,” he says, “and I’m ready to go.”

<< TOP