A Layover in Little Rock (Arkansas): January 3-January 5
Whew(!), after many planning meetings and no fewer than 20 updates for our students, we came together as a team on January 3 rd for a spirited final meeting and briefing for the seven a.m. departure on the 4 th. Meghan Youker from Channel 8 (from Lincoln) stopped by to ask for faculty and student perspectives (as well as the views of some of our generous local donors from True Value Hardware) on the trip. Meghan's piece aired on the five and six o'clock broadcasts and we taped it for a neat source of reinforcement for the early morning departure. We asked our student volunteers to complete a brief survey, addressed several excellent questions posed by the students, and worked feverishly through a lengthy to-do list.
We loaded all of our tools and traveling gear and left Crete about 8:30a.m. on Wednesday morning. The weather was beautiful and we made excellent time to our lunchtime destination in Wichita. We pushed on for Little Rock and had a late supper after checking in around 8:30p.m. In the morning, we toured the exhibit detailing the events surrounding the Little Rock Nine at Central High School and the struggle to desegregate education in the South. In the late morning and early afternoon, we toured the White River National Wildlife Refuge and searched mightily for the Ivory Billed Woodpecker that borders on extinction. Unfortunately, we were unable to sight the elusive bird but learned a great deal about its habitat and efforts to secure its future. While we would have liked to stay at both the Central High and NWR locations, we needed to push on to honor our commitments to our gracious hosts in the New Orleans area. We lunched in the town of Stuttgart in Arkansas and made our much-anticipated turn toward the hurricane-ravaged areas of Mississippi and Louisiana.
We had a very late supper in Jackson, Mississippi and refueled the vans for this last leg of our second day's journey. As we traveled through Mississippi, our van spoke of the events surrounding Freedom Summer and the bitter and often dangerous struggle for civil rights that were noteworthy in communities such as Meridian and McComb. Interestingly, this also allowed us to re-situate the day's earlier visit to Central High.
We arrived in Waveland close to midnight and the darkness of night cloaked the scope of the hurricane damage and blinded us to the full wrath of nature's fury.