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(Enlarge) Ann Higby, 19, of Catonsville, was a member of a team of volunteers from Catonsville United Methodist Church that also included her sister, Emily and Sarah, who repaired the home of Kimberly Kisser in Baltimore Highlands. (Photo by staff reporter Kevin Rector)

Surrounded by the noise and commotion of repair work, Kimberly Kisser sat in the living room of her Baltimore Highlands townhouse.

More than half a dozen members of Catonsville United Methodist Church worked in various rooms around her.

Nearby, Damien Thiel, an Oella resident, was replacing her front door frame.

Above her in an upstairs bedroom, Ken Erickson of Montrose Avenue directed four other volunteers -- sisters Ann, Sarah and Emily Higby and their friend, Emily Mengers -- on where to start painting.

In a corner of the bedroom, George Powell, a longtime Catonsville resident who recently moved to Howard County, and James Flaherty, a rising sophomore at Catonsville High School, were checking out the pipes in the wall that led to an adjacent bathroom.

Their goal was to replace a bathtub faucet.

Suddenly, Kisser cocked her head sideways.

"Is that a bang or a drip?" she said, listening.

"Oh! It's a drip," she said. "I gotta get that."

Water was coming through her kitchen ceiling from the leaky tub faucet above, as it had plenty of times before.

Kisser pulled a trash can off her back steps and placed it under the leak.

"There we go," she said, shrugging apologetically at the disrepair around her.

"I'm just grateful that there are people out there like this," she said of the volunteer church members.

"I thank God every night, and say, 'You know what, Lord? Thank you for sending these people into my life.'"

The eight volunteers in her home were there with the Baltimore County Christian Workcamp, an ecumenical organization of Christian churches from around the county whose members provide repair and construction work for elderly and low-income residents for one week each summer.

The organization, now in its 26th year, does painting, carpentry, plumbing and other manual jobs -- often in homes that county social and health workers have asked them to visit, said Chip Day, the group's co-chair and a member of Catonsville United Methodist.

Kisser, 47, said her social worker had contacted the group on her behalf.

A single mother, Kisser lives in her Baltimore Highlands home with her daughters, Kelly, 21, and Rebecca, 15.

Her two sons, Joseph, 14, and Jeremiah, 10, have been in foster care for the last five years, partially because of the poor state of the home, Kisser said.

"I've gotta make the house presentable," she said softly, obviously emotional about the subject.

"I'm a single mom and I can do it on my own, I know that, but...," she said before trailing off.

Kisser owns the home -- which used to be her parents' -- but has a hard time paying property taxes and keeping up with bills, she said.

She works part-time nearby at Roses department store on Annapolis Road, and has been looking for a second job.

But nobody is hiring, she said.

She's asked for more hours at Roses, but hasn't been given any yet.

Some days, she said, she goes without eating so she can save her food stamps for when her sons visit on weekends.

She often tells them during those meals that she'll eat later -- though she knows there will be no food left -- just so she can watch them enjoy the food during the little time she has to spend with them, she said.

When she heard the work camp volunteers were coming to work on her house, she was so happy that she "could have jumped (up) and said, 'Yahoo!'" she said.

Their work in her home will make a huge difference, she said.

The bathtub faucet that Powell, 63, and James, 15, were replacing had been broken for a long time, and the only way to stop it from running -- and leaking into the kitchen below -- had been to turn off the water valve, she said.

That also shuts water off to the toilet and the sink, so it's a constant problem, she said.

An attempt to fix the ill-fitting front door frame had been made by a friend before, but it wasn't successful, Kisser said.

Thiel, 26, who took a week off from work at SCC Framing, where he builds home frames, was doing a much better job, she said.

In an upstairs bedroom, Ken Erickson and his crew were making the room's forest green walls white.

Mengers, a 2009 Catonsville High graduate who starts at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire in the fall, said she enjoyed the work because it is "nice to help out and get things done."

Ann Higby, 19, who graduated from Catonsville High in 2007 and will be a junior at Towson University in the fall, said she felt the same way.

"It feels good to do something nice for people who need it more than you do," she said.

She said she and her sisters -- Sarah, 17, a 2009 Catonsville High graduate starting at McDaniel College this fall, and Emily, 14, who will be a freshman at Catonsville High -- have done similar volunteer work with Catonsville United Methodist in the past, though usually in more far-flung locations such as Costa Rica and Mississippi.

What's good about the work camp, said their mother, Karen Higby, is that it shows them that help is needed right in their back yard as well.

"Especially for youth, it can be a big eye-opener in understanding that not everybody lives the way you live, not everybody has the things you have," she said.

"I think they learn that they are, in a small way, capable of changing the world around them."

Day said the work camp -- which worked on about eight homes in the Catonsville and Arbutus areas and dozens more across the county last week -- also benefits from its local emphasis since it gives more people the opportunity to participate.

"What's so good about a project like this is that people can come for a day or two," he said. "They don't have to make a commitment to go away for a week or two, and it doesn't cost them an arm and a leg."

For Kisser, the hours of painting, carpentry and plumbing work the group provided her was invaluable, she said.

"I was joking and said, 'Hey, keep them coming back for months, because I've got plenty to do,'" she said.

"But really, that they have the talent, and are willing to help someone who is beyond their means, is amazing."

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