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Roxborough Residents Brave Tornadoes For Katrina Cleanup

Mercy Vocational students Matt Clugston, Marcello Sansone, and Pete Pavelka travelled to Biloxi, Mississippi to help rebuild over their spring break.

Roxborough residents Matt Clugston, Marcello Sansone, and Pete Pavelka started their spring break in typical teenage fashion: they piled into a van with a handful of friends and headed for warm weather. The similarities between theirs and the usual spring break end there though.

The three Mercy Vocational High School students spent their late-April off-week with 17 of their classmates not in a resort community, but in Biloxi, Mississippi helping rebuild the still-Katrina ravaged town as part of Mercy's Operation Katrina program.

Mercy students, owing to their budding technical expertise, are uniquely qualified for such an undertaking. And their unique contributions to the rebuilding effort—the school has sent a contingent down for the past six years—haven't gone unnoticed: Mercy was honored with a President's Volunteer Service Award in February.

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In keeping with this tradition, Clugston, Sansone, Pavelka, and the rest of the Mercy set—including seven chaperons—left for Biloxi in three buses on April 17. They slept in the retreat center of a local church and prepared their own meals. And they worked.

While the students performed numerous carpentry jobs, the chief project the Roxborough trio took on was rebuilding a deck for a septuagenarian widow they knew as "Miss Mary." The three, along with three other Mercy students, were responsible for each step of the construction: from the planning to painting on the finish.

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"We worked on her deck towards the end of our stay down there," explained senior Matt Clugston, a literal Eagle Scout who, in his second tour of Biloxi, was an Operation Katrina veteran. "We had five carpenters, and Marcello [Sansone], who is an electrician, on the job. And between the six of us, we went down, figured out what we needed to do, what kinds of materials and tools we would need, and we did it. We went into the job site with no working plans—we would have to create them ourselves."

That degree of control over a project was a new experience for the young team—and it was a necessary one. Clugston explained that none of the chaperons who went down, though all past and present Mercy teachers, taught shop. The students had become the masters.

And despite long hours—"We were supposed to stop working at 3:30 everyday, but we worked through dinner on some days," explained Sansone—and the relentlessly hot Mississippi sun—"I got really sunburned. We all did," admitted Clugston—they finished the deck on time.

The team's satisfaction from completing the project—which was immense—came not just from helping someone who needed it, but from the realization that they could.

"We were able to put what we learned at school into use," said Clugston. "And it went fantastic. Our teacher said that, to him, it looked like a professional did it."

Most importantly, the recipient of the deck agreed.

"Miss Mary loved it," added Sansone, a junior who aspires to be a PECO linesman after graduation. "When we were halfway done she ran up on the deck and started dancing and crying. She kept asking us when we were coming back."

Though the experience was rewarding, the positivity was tempered by an awareness of all the repair towns like Biloxi still need: after all, 20 students can only build so many decks in a week. Even six years later, the boys say parts of the Katrina-bit south evoke the Third World.

"There's still so much work that needs to be done," said Clugston. "New Orleans was the hardest place that got hit. We visited there one of the Saturdays, and we saw how much damage was still there: homes with missing walls, homes with their roofs ripped off, basically empty lots that used to have homes there. It's in pretty bad condition still."

"That's why I want to go down next year," said Sansone. "We've got to keep working."

Incidentally, work is now needed more than ever: as the students drove out of Biloxi, still exhausted from the cleanup of one storm, another wreaked havoc in the already battered region. One of the largest and most devastating tornado outbreaks ever recorded tore through the South, leaving hundreds dead and thousands without homes. The Mercy buses drove right through it.

"It was pretty scary to be honest," said Clugston, likely understating the experience of traveling in a packed bus on unfamiliar roads with a horde of tornadoes on his heels. "We're driving back, and we get through Alabama, and two hours after that the tornadoes hit. We realize that if we had stopped, to get food or whatever, we could have been in the middle of the tornadoes. It was pretty scary."

Scary for some anyway.

"I wasn't scared," insisted Sansone. "Some of the girls might have been, but I wasn't. It was crystal clear skies. Sunny, 80 degrees the entire way home."

"A lot of the girls called their parents saying that they loved them," added Clugston, "but I guess we knew we were safe. We were in good hands while we were down there, and we knew that the tornadoes were behind us. Our joke was, 'looks like next year we're going to Alabama.'"

Back in Roxborough, the boy's parents weren't laughing. For Vickie Clugston and Pat Pavelka, the pride they felt in their son's altruism quickly turned to fear as reports of the tornadoes tumbled in one after the other. No good deed goes unpunished.

"I was terrified," admitted Vickie Clugston, Matt's mom. "[During the bus ride home] he kept in touch with me with text messaging and stuff, but when I was hearing about where the storms where, and not being too sure where they were, yeah, I was scared. I just prayed really hard that the three vans would be safe on the roads."

"It was very, very scary," agreed Pat Pavelka, Pete's mom. "Who knows what's going to happen."

As it often does though, nothing happened. On April 29, the buses pulled safely into Philadelphia on schedule, and two of the boys played baseball the next day.

"The trip was definitely a bonding experience," said Clugston. "It helped us learn more about each other, and about what other people have to go through. You learn to be grateful for what you have, and see the ways you have to help other people."

A typical spring break.

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