The first time Heather Stapf went to New Orleans was in 2005, to visit Katrina Florek, a friend and classmate from the College of Notre Dame.

She left a week before another Katrina blew into town -- Hurricane Katrina.

In 2007, Stapf went back to New Orleans again to visit Florek, and saw a city and an economy devastated.

"It was dramatic," she said.

On July 12, Stapf, a 2009 graduate of Notre Dame, returned to New Orleans yet again, this time on a five-day volunteer trip by students to help rebuild houses in the communities of Chalmette and Violet, in an especially hard-hit area on the outskirts of New Orleans called St. Bernard Parish.

What Stapf saw this time was progress of a sort; a vision of how far New Orleans has come in four years, and of how far it has to go.

So many houses were torn down to their foundations that "it was like grave markers in a cemetery," she said.

Much of the world has moved on since Hurricane Katrina, but many young people have not. A group of nine students, led by Helene Murtha, director of the college's Center for Service and Honor, spent the week of July 12-18 joining volunteers, mostly young people, from around the country in projects that ranged from painting walls to laying floors in the heat of the summer.

But they also did something more important. By their very presence, they sent a daily message to displaced residents that they had not forgotten them.

Antoinella Peterkin, a Notre Dame sophomore, said she worked on one house whose owner, Robin Albers, had survived looting, flooding and a car accident, and was still in high spirits. Albers told the students they were an inspiration to her.

"But I think it was the other way around," Peterkin said.

Michelle Santos admitted that for a time, Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath faded from memory.

"The media completely forgot about New Orleans and so I forgot, too," said Santos, a senior at Notre Dame, who was on the trip with her sister, Allison Santos, a high school student in Anne Arundel County.

They decided it was important "to help people who had been forgotton about. It was our duty," Michelle Santos said.

Also on the trip from the College of Notre Dame were 2009 graduate Joy Weems and 2008 graduate Jennifer Hale; Mary Ensey, a junior; and Sister Mary Fitzgerald, who is a professor in Notre Dame's education department.

Fitzgerald, former president of the Institute of Notre Dame, a high school in east Baltimore, had the idea for the trip, Murtha said.

Sister Jane Moran, who teaches Spanish at Loyola College, also joined the trip, as did a contingent from a school Notre Dame partnered with, Academy of the Holy Angels in Demarest, N.J.

Some of the students were neophytes at such an intense volunteer effort. Others, like Weems, had done work in places such as a Catholic parish in Guatemala.

"I was ready to see how bad things could be," Weems said.

Hurricane Katrina left all 27,000 houses in St. Bernard Parish uninhabitable and fewer than 50 percent of residents have been able to return to their homes, according to the St. Bernard Project, one of many volunteer organizations in New Orleans. There are 66,000 residents in Chalmette alone.

Students heard a chilling statistic from a representative of the Church of the Brethren, in New Windsor, Md., which has an ongoing volunteer effort in New Orleans and hosts a Tuesday Taco Night for volunteers. If every single volunteer group there rebuilt one house a day in New Orleans, it would take 74 years to rebuild them all, the representative told them.

But students were undeterred. With a grant of $5,000 from the School Sisters of Notre Dame, and with each person on the trip paying $300 for food and airfare, they spent their stay rebuilding homes for grateful people like Sandy Allen and her son, who lived in a federal trailer in their front yard, and people like an older gentleman they knew only as Ferdinand.

He insisted on having his picture taken with them and said someday he would host a party for all of the volunteers who had helped him.

When the students visited the French Quarter wearing their green "New Orleans 2009" T-shirts, many residents asked who they were and said simply, "Thank you."

The students were glad to see so many other young people in New Orleans, many repeat volunteers, and they said they too would consider volunteering there again.

Peterkin said one man, a victim of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and of Hurricane Betsy in 1965, told them "he felt like we were not the lost generation."

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