(U-WIRE) SYRACUSE, N.Y. – While many Syracuse University students spent their spring breaks sleeping in air conditioned hotels, along sandy beaches or in their bedrooms, 25 SU students slept in a grocery store.

The abandoned grocery store-turned makeshift command center in Slidell, La., was home to 25 students, one staff member and an intern – all members of the SU chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ – for six nights. They volunteered as part of “Operation Blessing,” an organization that runs relief efforts around the world, to help families recover from Hurricane Katrina.

The women slept on bunk beds at the front of the store and the men slept in an old freezer packed with about 100 cots and one standing lamp in the middle of the space.

The students soon discovered their living arrangements were comfortable compared to the condition of the surrounding area.

On Sunday, March 12, after spending their first night in Louisiana, the group boarded several 12-passenger vans and made the 40-minute drive from Slidell to New Orleans. They saw the destruction in the area.

The French Quarter was very clean, but the rest of the city was destroyed.

“It was like they said, ‘We’ll put a Band-Aid over the problem for the news,'” said Sarah Benedict, a public relations sophomore, who went on the trip.

Students described seeing cars on top of roofs, trees lying across houses and refrigerators smashed on front lawns. They even saw a large fishing boat sitting in the middle of a road that local residents said was carried into the area during the floods, which hit Slidell with more than 8 feet of water.

“I was surprised at how much hadn’t been done,” Benedict said. She said she only saw about four FEMA trailers in the area, and many houses looked like they hadn’t been touched since the hurricane.

“This is still here after six months,” said Erin Keyser, a religious studies sophomore, of the destruction in the Gulf Coast region.

Beginning on Monday, March 13, the students divided themselves into two groups and were sent to clear the rubble at several homes in the area.

The houses were covered in dangerous black mold, which grew after the houses sat in stagnant water for months. As a result, each worker had to wear masks with respirators on them, goggles, hard hats and white Tyvex suits.

The students cleared out all of the things in the houses and piled them on the sidewalk. They then removed the drywall and insulation on the walls so the homes could be inspected and rebuilt.

The difficult work was complicated by the nearly 6 inches of mud, which covered the floor of many houses. The students had to carry out mud in old laundry baskets or in large tarps before they were supplied with the right equipment.

Other houses were covered in oil that had leaked from a nearby factory. The thick oil caused the insulation to stick to the frames of the houses. In one house, students even found a nest of water moccasins.

Despite the conditions in Slidell, students said many of the homeowners were strong-willed and optimistic, though many of the people impacted now live in hotels, with family members in other parts of the country or in trailers on their property.

“They look back on the situation without a lot of anger or blame,” Keyser said.

One man, a critic for Disney and collector of Disney memorabilia, lost everything he had. As the workers sifted through his possessions, they found thousands of posters, figurines and stuffed animals. The man clung to the things he had lost even though they could not be saved, Iamaio said.

“Out of all the homeowners, he seemed to take it the hardest, because it was his life and his life’s work,” said Rob Furey, a forest engineering sophomore.

Another homeowner had worked as a police officer from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. for weeks after Katrina. He maintained order in the community and helped save people and animals, though his own house was crushed when three trees fell on it.

This man, along with many other people in Louisiana, taught the students a life lesson.

“He placed emphasis on relationships with people and God rather than his possessions,” Iamaio said. “Life isn’t the stuff we have; it’s way more than the stuff we have. When it comes down to it, it’s really about the relationship to other people and with God.”