I recently returned from my third trip to New Orleans. Each year since Hurricane Katrina, I have seen gradual progress as homes are repaired and residents return.

The pace, however, is painfully slow. Two-and-a-half years after the storm, more than 4,000 homes remain to be gutted, only 50 per cent of residents have returned, and the day-to-day life of the city still harkens back to the events of Aug. 29, 2005.

For me, this trip was different. While in the past I have travelled with friends, this time I led a group of senior high school students.

During the day, we worked gutting homes, clearing debris and tearing down sheds that had been flooded. The work was both physically and emotionally challenging. In between swings of sledgehammers, we found photographs of families who once lived in the homes, and personal heirlooms that had been destroyed in the hurricane.

At night, we had time to reflect on the work we had done. We spoke about the power of the storm that destroyed a city and about the hope to rebuild. We pondered the decisions involved in choosing what objects to take when fleeing one’s home, and how a family decides if they should return.

Students spoke about their difficulty in balancing the excitement of wielding a hammer for the first time with recognizing that it was someone’s home that they were tearing down.

Most meaningful were the conversations with local residents.

One group worked beside Betty, a 53-year-old woman who was gutting her own home. As a 50th birthday present, Betty had undertaken major renovations on her house that were finished just in time to be destroyed by Katrina. Since returning to New Orleans, she has been slowly trying to gut the home in order to rebuild it. As our students helped her remove drywall, insulation and nails, Betty tearfully retold her story.

Beyond the lessons of destruction and rebuilding, our students were challenged by other new experiences.

While working on one house, a little boy named Brandon came into the street to play. Our students quickly went to join. They heard Brandon’s story of fleeing New Orleans before the storm and returning more than a year later. Brandon’s schooling had been disrupted, he was left back a grade, and when he returned to New Orleans, he found that most of his friends had not come back.

One of our students asked Brandon what he knew about Jews. His answer was honest in its ignorance, as only a child’s can be: “Jews are bad people. They killed God. They killed Jesus.”

Shocked by the candour of Brandon’s response, a number of our students froze, not knowing how to respond. This belief, after all, was meant to be something they would find in their Jewish history textbook, not while playing catch in the streets of the southern United States.

The group quickly recovered from the shock of their first experience with anti-Semitism. One student retorted, “I’m Jewish. Do you think that I killed Jesus?” As the dialogue continued and our students began to educate Brandon, it occurred to me that this conversation is one that most Jews of my generation will never have. For these students, however, Brandon had a profound impact on how they understand anti-Semitism and how they view themselves as Jews. It seems the experience of New Orleans was not only about witnessing devastation, hearing stories and helping people out.

We challenge our students in many ways. We push them to learn, grow and think. We encourage them to formulate questions and develop theories. In New Orleans, however, the experience of being confronted with new situations – pulling down a shed, empathizing with a woman who had lost everything or confronting a child who knew no better than the anti-Semitic rhetoric he had been taught – challenged our students to consider their personal identity and their place in the world. Often, stepping out into a world that’s foreign to us is how we learn the most about ourselves.