Allie Griffin and Hilary Nave, students at Naperville North High School, return from a walk around Bay St. Louis, Miss. The teens were among dozens of suburban high school students to go to the coastal town during spring break to help victims of Hurricane Katrina rebuild.

Jaws slack as the seven passenger vans carrying 60 subur-ban Chicago teens on a spring break of a different kind roll into this tiny coastal town passing flattened forests, piles debris and boarded up skeletons of strip malls.

They see straight through homes on the main road - transparent because the families and furniture that once filled them are gone.

Some chuckle at a sign for "Water Tight Roofing" atop a business that obviously didn't live up to its name.

On Aug. 29, Hurricane Katrina sent 130 mph winds through this town about 40 miles east of New Orleans.

A 30-foot wall of water followed and washed through homes and streets for about six hours before returning to the ocean, dragging all that it could with it.

Seven months later - during the last week of March - it looks as if the storm hit the day before the high schoolers arrived to help rebuild homes.

Now, the teens who have been looking forward to spending a week making a difference wonder how anyone can.

Debris still dangles from paradise oaks and pecans - what the locals call Katrina Christmas trees.

Kyle Kohls, 17, of Downers Grove screams during the first team meeting Sunday before the week of work begins for the teens. They do this each night to loosen up.

A few cars still remain upside down or stranded in the middle of roads - like overturned turtles that have given up their struggle.

"It doesn't seem real to me," says Kyle Kohls, 17, a junior at Downers Grove South High School.

To this point, fewer than half of the 8,500 residents here have returned since the storm, according to city officials like Mike Cuevas, who coordinates volunteers and donations.

"The total death count for the county was around 50, but the biggest tragedy for me has been the number of seniors we have lost due to the trauma of relocation and evacuation," Cuevas says. "There were several dozen that just weren't able to handle the stress."

Four people still are missing.

Locals who lost their regular jobs have accepted work as "spotters," monitoring cranes and dump trucks as they pick up heaps of debris to see if bodies are uncovered. The spotters hope they don't recognize those they know.

About 75 percent of those who've returned live in trailers, staring at houses they still pay mortgages on but can't live in. The rest have only concrete slabs outside of their trailers to remind them of their homes now swept away, Cuevas says.

Only one in 20 families have moved back into their homes.

And this town is only a fraction of the 90,000 square miles of destruction Katrina left behind.

The sights and the numbers seem to deflate the teens, who just 16 hours before gathered in a Downers Grove parking lot wrestling with whether to bring their iPods on the trip and complaining about having to leave their cell phones behind.

But for them, spending their spring break along the hurri-cane-ravaged Mississippi coast would change everything.

Modern conveniences and the comfort of their suburban high school cliques soon would grow less important as they learn to give of themselves to people who have nothing.

The group is a mix of those who feel called by God to go and those who just follow their friends.

Unbeknownst to them, they are joining a vast and ongoing pilgrimage made by suburban residents and volunteers worldwide to a place where most people still live in tents and trailers. Where people go to work in trailers. Where kids go to school in trailers.

Chelsea Strok and Danny Lopez squeeze in a Bible study before the work day begins on the steps of First Baptist Church, which was headquarters for the Campus Life group.

But leaders of Campus Life - the Christian organization heading up this trip - initially questioned whether the timing of this journey was right.

After all, hype about the hurricane and the need for relief had dwindled since the storm. And the dozens of kids who gather each week to mingle and talk about God during Campus Life meetings didn't talk much about it either, said Joel Longshore, who leads the group's Elgin division.

"Now, you just don't hear about it anymore," he said. "We wondered by that time: Would there be as many people to help?"

Yet signup sheets for the trip drew dozens of students from chapters based in West Chicago, Palatine, Wheaton, Mount Prospect, Elgin and Downers Grove.

Some students organized spaghetti dinners and door-to-door campaigns to raise money to cover their expenses.

But for as giving and selfless as some thought they could be, the realities of sacrificing even the smallest of luxuries set in during the 16-hour drive.

Slide show

"I keep reaching in my pocket for my phone, but I know it isn't there," says 15-year-old Andrew Crum, a sophomore at South Elgin High School, about an hour into the trip on March 25. "I even know it's not there. That's the bad part. How sad is that?"

Occasionally on this long trip, talk turns to the experience that awaits them.

"I'm so excited to work," says Arden Smith, 17, a senior at Downers Grove South. "I usually sit in class and I don't even do much in gym. This is going to be hands on."

As the group nears the end of its overnight trip, the caravan stops for lunch at the first open business they find in Bay St. Louis - an Italian buffet.

Inside, an encounter with the first resident the group meets unfolds much like the rest would.

Eve McDonald, 79, tries to stay on the topic of thanking them for coming, but she can't help slipping into reliving the storm.

Her hands draw pictures of the size of the trees that punched through her home and the depth of the water that flowed in the streets.

Slowly, the former Oak Park resident drifts back to thanking the teens by recounting the story of a mother and daughter who recently worked on her house.

"The mother told me with tears in her eyes that it changed her daughter's life in three days," she says.

She bids them good luck, and tells them to keep an eye out for her church as they head into town.

"It's the one with the steeple laying in the front yard," she says, almost as if it's normal.

Back in the vans, the teens pass a business where four inches of mud still coats the floor. Twisted and broken window blinds chatter in the wind. A calendar still displays Aug. 29 - the day life as most people knew it around here ended.

Next door, a blue plastic FEMA tarp shrouds the Baptist church that will serve as headquarters for the Campus Life group as well as about 40 other volunteers.

Adrin Smith, an adult leader with the group, seems unsure as he pulls the van into the parking lot.

"Is this the church we're staying at?" asks Smith.

"Yeah, it's the one without a roof," answers Melissa Molskow of Winfield, a 15-year-old sophomore at West Chicago High School.

"Some people have been living like this for seven months," says Emily Kenney of Arlington Heights, an 18-year-old senior at Hersey High School. "So, I think we can deal with it for one week."

Elgin kids make unlikely connection in Mississippi
What is Campus Life?

Monday: A week's work. Meet the teens and the families they helped during a spring break they will never forget.