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“I think I was meant to be there,” said junior Tony Wilson, a counselor and instructor at the day camp. “The way it all worked out, I felt like it was something I needed to do. Why else would everything fall apart like that?”

Wilson spent his 2006 spring break in New Orleans gutting houses with a group from Hamline and was so compelled to help that he spent two weeks in May doing similar relief work. During that time, he received an e-mail from another Hamline student, Lurelia Freeman, asking for help with a camp she was going to be a part ofčGulf South Youth Action Camp.

After 15 days of being home from New Orleans for the second time, two things happened. Wilson said he could not shake the feeling that he should still be there, and the job he had lined up in the Twin Cities fell through.

Wilson contacted the people of Gulf South camp who told him there would be a job there waiting for him if he could get to the camp in two days. So he got on a plane and the adventure began.

As a leader at Gulf South, he was not only a counselor, but instructor, maintenance man and behavior specialist, among other things. He and two other Hamline students were part of a 25-person team that led this free camp from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. every weekday for six weeks this summer.

Wilson’s section of the camp had about 100 kids and seven counselors. Every evening they would have a staff meeting to talk about how they could make the next day better for the students. “It was amazing how focused we were on these kids,” he said.

Gulf South was meant to not only be a place for kids to get back into the routine of life at school while their parents worked on finding jobs and homes, but a spiritual awakening for people from all walks of life as they worked with these young people.

“One of the best parts of this program was working with [the other counselors],” Wilson said. Counselors’ hometowns ranged from rural Wisconsin to suburban Chicago to New Orleans itself. The hours were long and stress levels were high, but to Wilson, it was worth it. “Every day went by so fast. You were having fun all day. If you were stressed out, it was because you didn’t have enough time to do everything you wanted to do.”

Wilson led the morning pep rallies that included songs and the camp’s motto. The motto was a call and response exercise that tried to instill in the students a sense of leadership, and a sense that they could make a difference in their world.

“We tried to get the kids to think about what are they going to do as people to help bring New Orleans up,” Wilson said.

He also led a music class and a technology class, even combining them once by having the kids direct and produce their own music videos. In his music appreciation class, the kids were exposed to all different kinds of music, including gospel, hip-hop, R&B and country. Wilson said that these classes taught him to think quickly on his feet due to the wide age range of his students.

Wilson taught his students that criticism needs to be constructive. He told them that if they didn’t like something, tell him and tell him what he could do to make it better.

“One day, this 6th grade boy came up to me with a manila folder and said ‘Tony, I don’t know what you’re planning to do today, but I’ve got something better.’ So I looked in [the folder] and he had made a lesson plan. That’s what I tried to get them to do the whole time. If you don’t like it, do something better, show me something better. You can’t go through life saying you hate everything without trying to fix it.”

Throughout the summer, the counselors and kids formed strong bonds and a mutual respect for each other’s opinions. It was obvious to Wilson that each person was changed by every other person at that camp. He said that camp was a time of personal growth. In a place with so much grief, like New Orleans, the counselors had to be pillars for the kids and the community for the summer.

“You want to be everything for every kid,” he said, “you want to make sure no kid has a bad day.”

The hardest part for Wilson was seeing the anger in the kids. They seemed to be in survival modeč not necessarily from the physical devastation Katrina causedčbut from the racism and classism that had been there all along.

Wilson talked about how the kids fought, always reacting to any situation with violence. “The kids are so innocent, they are the sweetest little kids, but somewhere down the line, society has gotten to them that they have to be barbaric just to get by.” Their anger was not necessarily caused by a single event or person or organization; rather, inherited from generations of dealing with racism and distrust. He explained that when parents pass the distrust they learned from their friends and family on to their kids, they know no differently.

Wilson is optimistic about the progress and future of New Orleans. “The area right now is coming together fine,” he said, “the people there are very strong. They’re very strong and they’re working together.”

The heightened presence of FEMA trailers, from May to August, as well as volunteers and residents of New Orleans was encouraging. “The volunteers are what’s keeping everything going,” Wilson said.

As President of the Katrina Response Network, a Hamline student organization,Wilson is planning two trips this school year back to New Orleans, as well as art presentations, speakers, movie showings and other events to help raise awareness of the situation. The first event is an presentation of a photo exhibit by Jennifer Kramer, who was a relief worker in New Orleans. It will be on display for ten days, starting Sept. 25 in Giddens Learning Center.