The house in New Orleans was deserted when Sarah Sullivan and the other teens from York County climbed into their plastic jumpsuits and started swinging their hammers.

Hurricane Katrina had done a thorough job, ransacking the home with a fury that savaged walls, floors, ceilings and everything in between. Except for one thing.

Hanging in a closet, relatively undamaged, was a long white wedding gown.

“Someone was going to get married or someone had just gotten married, but they couldn’t keep the memory, they just had to leave everything they had,” said Sullivan, 17, a junior at Thornton Academy. “We just had to throw it away.”

In details like these lay the lessons of devastation and survival, despair and hope that Sullivan and her friends have learned on relief missions to Lousiana. Some of the teens have traveled south three times since January 2007, gutting and rebuilding storm-ravaged homes on trips organized by United Church of Christ congregations in York County.

Their most recent mission ended just a few weeks ago, and on the flight back, some of the youths were already hatching plans for their next trip. These expeditions offer support to New Orleans residents as they struggle to restore their battered city some two and a half years after Katrina struck. But the students will tell you that their lives are also being changed.

“I see the world as a different place now,” said Lauren Roedner, 17, of Saco, “Even though we’re 16, 17 and 18 years old, we really can make a difference in someone’s life.”

UCC congregations sponsored missions in January and June of 2007 and again in January of this year. Each trip lasts for a week, and the congregation holds fund-raising events to defray the $600 cost of travel, rooming and meals for each person.

The missions include adults as well as teens no younger than 16, and while there are no specific intentions to send young people to New Orleans, they have made up a large part of each group.

Kristine Galasyn, director of Christian education at First Parish Congregational Church in Saco, said York County teens made a personal connection with New Orleans when a girl from that city came to a summer church camp in Maine. After meeting her, the local teens were determined to go down and help.

The Saco church’s UCC counterparts in the New Orleans area coordinate the work and direct mission groups to homes where demolition or rebuilding is needed. Most of the homeowners lack insurance or the income to pay for the cleanup and repairs themselves.

It’s dirty, tedious work, removing damaged household goods, ripping down moldy ceiling tiles or sheetrock, pulling nails, sweeping up other debris and generally stripping a home down to its framing for reconstruction.

Hammers, pry bars, brooms and chisels are the tools of choice, and elbow grease is the primary force.The teens wear plastic clothing and face masks to protect them from exposure to mold and dust.

Roedner, one of the Saco teens who went in 2007, said she wasn’t prepared for how much work remained to be done more than a year after the hurricane.

“It really was still a devastated city,” she said. “Parts of it looked like a ghost town.”

Galasyn’s son, Jeffrey, 17, a Thornton Academy student, said he was moved by how Katrina survivors had an urgent need to tell their stories – as though no one had really listened to them.

“To me, it was heartbreaking,” he said, “hearing them pour their guts out to total strangers.”

Rarely did the youths meet the owners of the homes they were gutting. Those folks were gone, to Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers, the homes of relatives, or some other destination.

The experience made for a strange combination of intimacy and distance, as the...