By Gretchen Keiser

Maria Picanso, a petite dark-haired student from the University of Lowell, Massachusetts, was perched at the peak of the tin-roofed Georgia mountain house. She had a long-handled mop in her hand and was using it like a massive paint brush to swab a shiny aluminum paint on the rusting metal roof.

Below her, halfway down the slanted side, Bill Ward -- wearing a Rolling Stones T-shirt -- had a large canister of paint and another mop. They had just about finished repainting one side of Mrs. Viona Martin’s roof.

Looking up at them from her front yard, Mrs. Martin shaded her eyes with her hands against the late morning sun. She wore a sunbonnet and an apron over her print dress and as she walked about the yard, she gently reached for a visitor’s arm to steady her gait. Her husband died about a year ago at the age of 94 and Mrs. Martin, who is 83, was hospitalized last May, which has slowed her down a bit.

“The doctor said, ‘Don’t you go home and start splitting wood and driving your garden plow,’” she recalled of her release from the hospital.

Because she needed some help, Mrs. Martin, who has lived in this house on a dirt road outside of Dahlonega, Ga. for over 50 years, got to meet and talk to the Lowell students, who came to Georgia in January on a helping project led by the University’s Catholic chaplain.

“I’m enjoying them,” Mrs. Martin said emphatically, of her newfound friends and helpers.

“I had to show them all about my stove,” she said of the wood-burning stove which heats her simple house and gives her a place to cook. “How I patch it up, keep it going,” she continued. “I don’t reckon they’ve ever seen one before.”

While the others painted, Jane Astle, another student, kept Mrs. Martin company, working a puzzle with her and listening to her stories of her husband and family and of how she managed with her garden and the wood neatly stacked out back. The team’s visit had also let Mrs. Martin know that she could receive some help from the government to pay for the cost of heating her home, even though she simply heats it with her wood stove.

This was a small part of a week-long visit to the Dahlonega and Dawson county areas of Georgia by the students -- 13 in all -- who drove from Massachusetts in vans with Father Fred Guthrie and Joe LaBelle, a lay minister of the Boston archdiocese who assists Father Guthrie in campus ministry.

The visits to Georgia began five years ago through the friendship between Father Guthrie and Glenmary Father Bob Poandl who was then pastor of St. Luke’s in Dahlonega. Over the five years nearly 100 Massachusetts students have come to Georgia during this semester break, staying with parishioners in Dahlonega and Dawson County, working with those in need in the area, and -- in the process -- taking part in an unusual kind of working retreat.

In the Dahlonega area, St. Luke’s parishioner Roger Roy coordinated the students’ projects finding families who needed help through the Department of Family Services in Dahlonega and through the network of the parish. Students split and chopped wood, delivering it to the homes of elderly people, like Mrs. Martin, who use it to heat their homes. Another older couple in the parish had a donated rug rolled up on their front porch for a year, which some of the young men in the group were able to lay for them.

Meanwhile, in neighboring Dawson County, St. Luke’s newly formed mission of Christ the Redeemer in Dawsonville took about half the visiting students under their wing. While eight students stayed at the home of Jim and Rita Lowe, projects were lined up with the help of Dawsonville’s energy conservation program, senior citizens’ center, the Dawson County Health Department and Department of Family and Children’s’ Services.

In the Dawson County area, the students helped to winterize the homes of the elderly, putting up plastic storm windows to seal out the cold. They also cut and delivered firewood, worked as volunteers in a health clinic and in the ambulance service and cleaned the houses of elderly people who couldn’t manage without help.

While some stayed in the “dormitory” at the Lowes’ and others with the Porcelli family in Dahlonega, they gathered every night at the “home base” Catholic Center next to St. Luke’s for Mass, a community meal, games and relaxation. They began the week staying one day and night at the resort lodge at Forrest Hills, owned by St. Luke’s parishioners Frank and Darlene Kraft.

“Basically, I see the whole experience in terms of a retreat,” said Father Guthrie, a sandy-haired, youthful priest who was out each day with the students, talking to the Georgia Mountain people they were meeting. “You always get away from your own place for a retreat.”

The Georgia experience brings the students, some of whom have never left Massachusetts before, into a “different culture, a different value experience,” he said.

Out of Lowell’s 9,300 student body, those who opt to come on the Georgia trip are already “risk takers” who are interested in helping other people, he observed. But on the trip they learn something profoundly new about what it means to be the church, Father Guthrie said.

“They bring back a wholly different attitude in terms of Church,” he said. They reach out to others. “This sets a mentality that permeates the whole Catholic community” at Lowell.

While the group had started out from Massachusetts as virtual strangers, knowing at most one or two of the other students, by the last night in Georgia they were deeply at home, clustering in groups of twos and threes on the floor and couches of the Lowes’ home for a final pot-luck dinner and farewell. The jokes were circulating about who in the group had been voted “most weird,” and second and third runner-up.

“We’ve all become so close,” said Beth McCabe, a junior who made the decision to join the group at the last minute. “You just couldn’t imagine the trip without each person because they’ve each added so much.”

Asked what the highlight of the week had been, she said, emphatically, “Meeting the people.”

Earlier that afternoon, she had been sitting in animated conversation with an 88 year-old Appalachian woman, after helping to deliver a stack of firewood to the woman and her 92-year-old husband. A blackened pot on the wood-burning stove held two squirrels cooking, the woman Melrose told her visitors.

When Beth asked how to cook squirrel, Mrs. Lomax provided the recipe, pausing at the end to say, “You can fry them just like you do a rabbit.”

“You know how to cook a rabbit, don’t you?” she asked Beth.

“I’m from Boston!” Beth replied. “I don’t know how to cook a rabbit!”

“Lord have mercy,” Mrs. Lomax replied. “Leave her here with me. I’ll teach her how to cook!”

With the wonder of that encounter and others shining on her face, Beth said that she had seen it as a “real challenge” to come on the trip to Georgia.

“I think so often faith and love can be talked about, but there aren’t enough chances to express it.”

Two of the young men, Bill Provencher and Joe Bernier, were in Georgia for the second time, veterans of last year’s trip. Maria Picanso, who said that she had never been this far from her hometown before, described in her joy in slowing down and focusing upon the people she was meeting. The elderly people seemed to be surrounded by so much beauty and simplicity and yet they were very lonely, she observed. The highlight was to listen to people, she said, “to be able to forget everything and enjoy who you were with at that moment, to give them the time, to let them talk about who they are, to let them express their sorrow, to laugh.”

For their hosts in Dahlonega and Dawson County, the visit was also very meaningful. The fledgling community of Christ the Redeemer in Dawsonville -- twelve families strong -- took the students to breakfast on Sunday morning and hosted the farewell dinner and Mass. Men in the community, including Jim Lowe and Al Gardella, worked alongside the students at wood splitting and chopping and coordinating the details of the days. After a week of fixing coffee and sandwiches for her new “family” of eight, Rita Lowe was unabashedly crying after the farewell Mass, while the students teased her. Others at the Mass commented upon the high quality of the students’ work and how much that meant to people in Dahlonega and Dawson County, especially those who had been unfamiliar with the Catholic church.

“You don’t know it,” said pastor Father John Henley, “but you’ve been preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”