The Desire Community and Dinner with Dr. Cherry

So I'm still swamped with so much work, but I decided to take a little time out to take a study break and write about this great opportunity that I had last night. I had the privilege of eating dinner at Dr. Cynthia Cherrey's home with members from the Tulane and Desire community.

First, who is Dr. Cynthia Cherrey, you may ask? Dr. Cherrey is the Vice-President for Student Affairs here at Tulane and Dean of Students (you can click on the link for a fuller bio) which means that she works closely with the students and student life here at Tulane. Since I am a community service scholar, I was invited to her beautiful home yesterday evening for a delicious dinner catered by Tulane's own Olive Blue (GWA uses them to cater as well!) to bring together members from the Tulane and the Desire community which included students, Tulane faculty and staff, and members of the Desire neighborhood.

Second, what is the Desire neighborhood? The Desire neighborhood is one of the housing projects in New Orleans located in the upper Ninth ward which I had the opportunity to spend a day at last semester on a Spotlight tour conducted by Tulane to show students different areas of New Orleans. We actually got to play with the children of the neighborhood that day as the community members put on a community yard sale to raise money for the community center that they are trying to build. Below are a couple pictures of some of us playing with the kids at Desire

There were two very moving points in the evening last night. One was when Luke, one of the Tulane students at the dinner who is part of the Roosevelt Institute, spoke about how what people who do community service fail to realize sometimes is that they think they are knights on a white horse coming to rescue the people they are trying to help when in fact most of the time what the people need is a friend with a helping hand. And what we're coming as are friends with helping hands.

The second point was when Miss Julie, one of the community leaders from Desire, spoke about how she know that the Desire neighborhood needed help, and how historically, their neighborhood has been overlooked and "was nothing to everybody." She was moved to tears by the fact that an institution as big as Tulane would help out people that everyone else overlooked. She was truly so grateful that Tulane was helping Desire raise money to build a community center. I was glad I was able to witness such a beautiful moment.

Anyways, that was what I had to share for today. Only one more week of Destination Tulane! Hope to see you there! I've met so many great prospective students already, and I want to see all of you in the fall! I'll be an OC in Monroe!