Students toil on Katrina relief for spring break

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It isn't the spring-break beach holiday most U.S. college students dream of, but with the shore still strewn with wreckage and homes in shambles from Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf Coast is the destination of choice for thousands like Greg Hall. The 18-year-old University of Toledo engineering student is spending the week in ravaged Pass Christian, Mississippi, gutting and rebuilding houses along with 124 others from his Ohio school. Their holiday accommodation is a wind-battered auditorium jammed with cots and sleeping bags.

"This is better than lying on some beach," Hall said as he swatted at a cloud of tiny insects. "The devastation is amazing, but I'm in engineering so I'm looking at this as a way to see how things are built." College kids from across the United States have answered the call to forsake March parties in Daytona Beach, Florida, and Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, in favor of fixing and cleaning homes, schools and community centers in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

The August 29 hurricane killed 1,300 people along the coast and in New Orleans and another 2,000 are still listed as missing. As many as 300,000 homes were damaged or destroyed. Along Interstate 90 through Pass Christian, Gulfport and Biloxi, Mississippi, the effects are still staggering, with half-collapsed hotels, gas stations reduced to steel skeletons and scraped-up concrete pads where homes once stood. Six months after the storm there is more than enough work for thousands of students from universities like Pennsylvania State, Howard, Rutgers, Washington and many more.

EXTRA HANDS

Hall is one of 7,000 marshaled by a group called Campus Crusade for Christ. The United Way and MTV are sending 100 spring breakers to Biloxi and Foley, Alabama. Katrina On the Ground, supported by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peopleand National Urban League, hopes to recruit 1,000 African-American students by pointing out blacks accounted for 44 percent of storm victims. Many students are paying their own way and some have held pledge drives to fund trips to sites where the work is hard and accommodations spartan.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060306/us_nm/hurricanes_springbreak_dc