LSU Faces Onslaught of Refugees

BATON ROUGE, La.—The campus of Louisiana State University (LSU) has morphed from a picturesque academic haven to a full-blown refugee center this week in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

As government aid workers and Red Cross volunteers took over the athletic centers of Louisiana’s flagship university Friday, refugees continued to arrive and waited for housing. The school plans to resume classes Tuesday but is struggling to stay on schedule.

“We are maxed out,” said LSU Chancellor Sean O’Keefe. “We’re at risk of transitioning the nature of what we provide to the public if we veer too far from what we’re providing now. What we are now is a high-tech medical center.”

“This was just five days ago. It seems like 500 years ago when everything was normal,” he said.

Students at LSU dealt with different choices: how to stay safe with strangers on campus, how to get to class with skyrocketing gas prices, how to find parking in an overstressed campus, how to take a number of new students enrolling from schools like Tulane and Loyola—a number that had reached 1,400 by Friday afternoon.

“So, professors, you can expect new faces,” said O’Keefe, speaking at a town hall meeting Friday for students and professors in a full, 1,000-seat auditorium normally used for lecture classes. “As challenging as it is, it’s a fraction of what those students are going through.”

O’Keefe apologized for a campus-wide e-mail Thursday, September 1 entitled “Civil Unrest in Baton Rouge” that spread unconfirmed rumors of shoot-outs and robberies across the campus and the capitol city, worsening tension between the local population, largely white, and the refugees who are largely low-income and black.

“That was exaggerated—my apologies,” he said.

While athletic centers served as triage centers and shelters, another building became a menagerie for animals of refugees. Outside the Pete Maravich Assembly Center, New Orleans natives sat on metal chairs, waiting for a way out of the scene which even O’Keefe acknowledged had no real leader.

The majority of volunteers were LSU students, and the start of classes may lead to a decline in volunteer numbers at students turn their focus to academics.

Tierney LeJeune, an LSU sophomore, sat cross-legged across from a three-year-old girl, the daughter of a woman sitting in the shade offered from the coliseum’s massive awnings.

The toddler flipped erratically through a cardboard word book entitled “Water Animals.” Pointing to a dolphin, she said, “I don’t like those.”

The girl was the little sister of Nigia Lovechild, 20, who had waited out Hurricane Katrina with 11 other family members in a New Orleans apartment atop Chris Owens Club, a Bourbon Street restaurant where her mother and father both work.

While they managed to eat well days after the storm—steak and jambalaya—growing danger in the streets prompted the family to pull their two SUVs out of a French Quarter garage at 8 a.m. Thursday.

Lovechild, who watched over her own 1-year-old daughter, is eight months pregnant.

LeJeune’s mother, who was also volunteering, brought Lovechild a pair of white Birkenstock clogs, the kind worn by nurses. A few minutes later, Kathy LeJeune, 46, returned with a promise of a night’s sleep at a nearby church.

But after the group carried in garbage bags their few possessions—towels, applesauce cups, a pillow to serve as a changing table—an escape seemed impossible.

“They say they can only take the momma and the baby and the daddy,” Kathy LeJeune said.

Instead, the volunteer promised to ferry the family to her home in Iota, La. She was living in her daughter’s apartment in Baton Rouge. “There’s no power but you can all be together,” she said.

Lovechild gazed blankly into hot sun, holding her baby close above the bulge in her stomach.

Monica Clark, student body president of the University of New Orleans (UNO), thanked LSU at the meeting, winning applause as soon as she said her school’s name.

She had evacuated with a friend on Saturday night, joining the traffic on I-10 to Baton Rouge. There, she joined her family at her home, but she didn’t know about her fellow students, 80 percent of whom are from New Orleans.

“We’re still looking for them,” Clark said.

On Friday, seeking “some type of normalcy,” Clark visited the admissions office and became an LSU student one hour later. UNO, which has 1,700 undergraduate students, ran a makeshift office in an LSU building. Clark said she saw a lot of her friends on campus.

“It doesn’t matter what school you’re from. You’re all in this together,” Clark said.

—Staff writer April H. N. Yee can be reached at aprilyee@fas.harvard.edu.