Dear President Herbert and IU Board of Trustees,

Last evening I returned from the Biloxi, Mississippi Gulf Coast region with 197 Indiana University students who gave 6 days of their Winter Break to assist in recovery efforts. I assure you that it was a proud moment for Indiana University when on our last evening, the Governor of the state of Mississippi sent a representative to our tent city to thank the students for their unprecedented efforts. Ours was the largest volunteer group to come to the state and work in the disaster area.

The enormity of the devastation still extant since late August is mind-boggling and no picture tells the story adequately, but the students have each come back with indelible memories of scores of survivors and relief workers. For me, the most compelling pictures I will keep in my mind and heart are those of a dozen “frat boys” struggling under the weight of a tombstone they retrieved for a grieving 88-year-old woman searching for her husband’s grave in the Pass Christian cemetery and crying with her when she wept with relief that they had found it under a pile of fallen trees and other shattered tombstones 20 yards away. Or the international students who had given their tools away to a family whose lot they were unable to clear because we could not obtain a FEMA-issued “right to enter” document and if they did work on that lot, it might jeopardize the family’s insurance assessment for eligible reimbursement. I watched those same students a day later, minus their tools, use their gloved hands to rake the ground surrounding a retired couple’s trailer and carry brick by brick the remnants of their home to the streetside, while the husband and wife looked on in amazement and gratitude.  

I saw students fight back tears as they had to refuse more than two boxes of macaroni and cheese to a mother of two children at the food distribution center the day after FEMA funds ran out on 12/21 for evacuees to eat hot meals in the tents erected to feed volunteers. And I saw students make up silly song and dance routines at night to cheer the cooks and the workers who cleaned the port-o-potties used by all of us plus the families living in the Harrison County tent city.

I listened as the students met nightly in small groups as their peer leaders led them in Reflection and when they asked piercing questions about the bureaucratic and political barriers they encountered, and posed deeply insightful questions about the nature of human suffering and the resilience of the human spirit.

President Herbert and Trustees, you may have missed the Fox News Network’s national coverage of our students this past Wednesday night, when the students issued an “Indiana Challenge” to other universities and campuses across our state and nation. The student leaders of the trip and the students on each work team want to ask IU to make a sustainable commitment to the region through volunteer spring break and summer service and service-learning classes in an intentional way over the next three years. The organization that Governor Daniels’ office directed us to work with in coordinating our trip, Hope Crisis Response Network, (HCRN) has asked the students to create a manual documenting the “how-to’s” of all they did to make the trip happen and to detail the logistics of fund-raising, publicity, transportation and donations they designed so that other university students can do the same.

On Tuesday afternoon, an older African American gentleman called out to us as one of the IU Motor Pool Suburbans was pulling out of a parking lot with a vanful of students going to assemble makeshift school furniture. He kept staring at the IU logo on the side of our mud-coated van: “Indiana University?” “Bloomington Indiana?” “You’re from Indiana University and you’re down here to help us???” he kept saying. His name is Norm___ *and he is a 1957 graduate of IU, his education paid for by the Air Force to study Russian Language and whatever Telecomm was before it was called that. He shook his head in disbelief.

What the students did from dawn to dusk each day this week in Long Beach, Pass Christian and Biloxi, Mississippi is a Hoosier story and I want to let you know that they intend to keep that connection alive and growing and they count on your help.

Thank you in advance for listening to them when they come to you,