During spring break, I traveled to New Orleans with a group of 17 students — including Michigan football players Craig Roh and Jordan Reilly — from Young Life College, a student faith organization at the University, to help families displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Though it may seem like the hurricane is a thing of the past, there was still a lot of work to be done.

After cramming our luggage into the back of four vans, we began our 16-hour trip to Louisiana. In an attempt to get acclimated to the Southern culture, Craig, Jordan and I bought black cowboy hats during a stopover in Nashville and listened to country music the entire way.

While in New Orleans, we stayed in a village run by the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, an organization that coordinates relief efforts in New Orleans. Though three other groups were staying there also — about 65 total people — we only had four showers and a few toilets.

After watching an orientation video on our first full day, the group couldn’t wait to get into the field to work. During the film, one of our group members noticed there were numbers and big X's spray painted on the doors of homes damaged by the storm.

We learned that after the hurricane, relief workers from the National Guard and the local forces placed an emphasis on saving those still alive, and if a dead body was found in a house, the rescuers would mark it with a large X and the number of dead bodies found inside so they could be picked up later. It was tough hearing that, to think of the people who had no idea if their family members were alive or dead, because their bodies had not yet been identified.

That first day, we began work at a house in the 17th Ward. The outside of the house looked decent, but the inside was a wreck. I started by putting up side paneling on part of the house, and then we tore down interior walls and put up new doorframes.

The workers who had been at this site for weeks told us the home’s owner was an elderly woman who showed up every day and talked about how blessed she was to have our help.

Though I was disappointed that I hadn’t yet met any of the homeowners of the sites we were working on, I recognized that every day, the progress grew tremendously. Despite the newly- formed blisters on my hands, I just wanted to get as much done for these people as possible.

Our fifth day was fun despite the intense assignments we were given. We used power tools and sledgehammers to demolish 20 feet of cement, and when we moved on to tearing up a roof, I was a great help being the only one who didn’t need a ladder to reach most of the rafters.

On the sixth day of the trip, we changed sites and helped put the last touches on a house that was almost finished. The homeowner’s name was Wesley, and he told us the water from Katrina reached up to top of his roof.

We painted a few spots in the house, moved furniture in and cleaned the floors and windows. When we were done, Wesley’s home became the 100th house completed by Project Homecoming — a nonprofit volunteer organization that manages rebuilding projects for Katrina survivors.

After the completion of the house, we toured New Orleans with one of the construction coordinators, Duncan. We stopped at the levees in the Lower Ninth Ward where Duncan explained that the poor levee system was the reason the city flooded during the hurricane. If the system had been up to date, the destruction would have been minimal.

As we stood on the levee that was once thought to protect the Ninth Ward, Duncan told us this part of town was the most populated before the storm. We looked over the land and were shocked to see so much empty space where miles of houses once stood.

Our next stop was a construction area in the Lower Ninth where Brad Pitt’s charity organization was working to build homes. It was cool to see the work people have been doing in the city. Even though the hurricane was five years ago, people are still just starting to get their lives back. The head of Project Homecoming said that around 24 percent of people have not been able to get back to their homes.

On our last night in New Orleans, we hung out in the French Quarter and Bourbon Street. We drank coffee, listened to some great blues bands, and really got a feel for the character of the city.

I was devastated when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but actually being in the heart of the destruction and seeing what it is still like five years after blows my mind — it breaks my heart. So many of the people of New Orleans just need to catch a break, and that is exactly what Project Homecoming is there for. I am so glad to be a part of it.

-- This Personal Statement was adapted from a blog Ben Cronin kept for www.mgoblue.com while he was in New Orleans. Cronin is a freshman in the School of Kinesiology and a center on the men's basketball team.