"Finishing What We Started"

by John Hitch

When asked why he would sacrifice his weeklong respite for complete strangers 1,100 miles away, Jacob Roope was honest.

“I went because of a girl,” he admitted. The shy freshman from Clyde had developed a crush on a co-ed. She was going on the trip, so naturally, he signed up as well.

After shelling out $299, Roope’s romantic gesture backfired. His crush started dating someone else just weeks before the trip. Initially, he wanted to back out.
“I was like, ‘Man, I want a refund.’ Then the guilt hit me.”

After introspection, he said to himself, “Just suck it up and go.”
Roope did go, in a long caravan of buses that took almost a full day to reach the Mississippi coastline. He remembered “the horrendous lines for the bathroom” along the way.

The conditions would not get any better.

They arrived in Tent City, which Roope says reminded him of the show “M.A.S.H.” Ten to 15 volunteers were crammed into each tent.
Over the course of a week removing debris and “mucking out” houses, Roope discovered the images on television couldn’t prepare him. “You don’t know it, how bad it is, until you get down there,” he said.

The trip made him a changed man, he said. “It brought me back to reality.”

“It’s something I won’t ever forget. It’s something I don’t want to,” he said.

It’s fitting that the casino-laden Mississippi coast would get help from a bet. After playing some racquetball at the Student Wellness and Recreation Center in Fall 2005, Gary Padak, dean of undergraduate studies, and chef Ron Perkins made a weight-loss wager in which the loser would donate $500 to the winner’s charity of choice.

They remembered George Garrison, Pan-African studies professor, who had just driven a truckload of supplies to the devastated Gulf Coast.

After talking with Garrison, their little wager inflated to a full-blown effort to support Katrina victims in Mississippi, which Padak says was “shuttled to second-place in the news.”

By November, Kent State United for the Gulf Coast had formed. The following spring break, a group of 300 volunteers from Kent State and 100 more from the surrounding area volunteered to help those affected by the storm in Pass Christian, Miss. An estimated 35-foot tall tidal surge, a U.S. record, blindsided the quiet town.

The volunteer base from Kent has dwindled over the years as Katrina fades from memory. Sixty-five people — 20 of whom are returning volunteers — went on the most recent trip from March 21 to March 28. They returned to Pass Christian to work with Habitat for Humanity and Camp Coast Care.

The incentives have improved. Return volunteers pay $199. First-timers still pay $299. Students can also earn one course credit for making the trip. Pamela Jones, academic program coordinator for undergraduate studies, says the work also builds a strong résumé and fosters personal development.

"It defines your character, your maturity level, your degree of risk taking and defines that you are an individual comfortable with stepping out of your safe zone,” Jones says.
Roope agrees.

“It’s that self-actualization everyone tries for,” he says.

Roope, now on Padak’s administrative support staff, has remained faithful, returning six more times to the Biloxi area including this past spring break. He even recruited his younger brother Nicholas, a Kent State freshman.

The January trip was in jeopardy, because Jones, as the primary organizer, couldn’t juggle planning two annual expeditions with her university-related work. Roope and two other students, Sarah Weekly, a seven-trip veteran, and Emma Sherrie, who made all but the last two, took charge.

“They handled all the details, from beginning to end,” Jones said.

The small contingent of volunteers worked with Camp Victor Ministries, a Lutheran-based organization serving Jackson County, Miss., founded because of Hurricane Katrina. Comprised of a full-time paid staff, long- and short-term volunteers, the former sewing factory in Ocean Springs has helped about 29,000 families. The staff there says the rebuilding is only about 30 percent done and could take another eight to 10 years.

Roope doesn’t know how long his streak will go, but he wants to help one person at a time. He has seen the region’s three-year metamorphosis from wastelands back to beach towns and wants to see it through.

“We’re not doing something half-assed. We’re going to finish what we started. So many people have been let down. The whole point is to get their lives back to the way it was.”