No pay, cramped quarters, teens find God in serving

"His last message he wrote to me mentioned that his father died when he was younger, and that he wished that he could have had a father like me," says Shepard.

Shepard hasn't missed a summer with Group Workcamps since then, spending three weeks of his four-week summer vacation with the organization.

"I have to go, it's what rejuvenates me for the new school year," he says.

Charmaine Grippo, a hairdresser and mother of two from Madison, Wis., was equally dubious before her workcamp experience began.

"Who wants to raise $345 to volunteer, travel on a long van ride with rowdy teenagers, and live in a school with crowded showers for a week?" she remembers asking herself.

But after seeing the unexpected dedication of the young adults, who put in extra-long hours to finish the ramp on Ms. Emery's house, she says she is "renewed with faith" that her own kids will turn out well.

"It's a great witness to see these young people sacrificing," she says.

Sacrifice is a concept that high-schooler Tim Hale thought a lot about during the trip. The son of a Methodist pastor from Selbyville, Del., he thought he had that definition bagged, until he met a youth from a different Christian denomination.

"My new theory goes: I think Jesus committed the ultimate sacrifice, because his death caused people to know him and follow his teachings - which caused them to stop sacrificing animals," he concludes.

Similarly, others say a highlight of the trip is meeting so many people with whom they can freely discuss Christianity.

"It just gives me a lot more confidence about my religious beliefs, especially when no one at my high school is very religious," says Cindy Carpenter of Elyria, Ohio.

But others will say that what clenched the experience was seeing first-hand the hard reality of places that needed help, and having the chance to contribute.

High-schooler Megan Gemignani recalls her experience last year when her church youth group from Hudson, N.Y., went to a workcamp at Tickbite Road in Kinston, N.C. A flood the summer before had devastated a neighborhood, killed people, and destroyed homes.

As they absorbed the enormity of the disaster, "everyone was in tears," she recalls. Megan and a friend placed throughout the destroyed homes small beaded crosses they had made.

"You cried even though you didn't even know [the flood victims]," she says.

Ms. Grippo, the hairdresser, concludes that it is "experiences like those that really further you on a spiritual journey."

To many, there is just something about toiling in relative anonymity for the satisfaction of doing a good deed.

Or, as Grippo says, recalling a Chinese proverb:

"I hear and I forget/ I see and I remember/ I do and I understand."

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