By JULIE ESPINOSA

When petite high school junior Maranda Mauzy and her friend Erica Weight showed up to a volunteer meeting last summer for post-tsunami rebuilding in Thailand, there was reason enough to doubt their ability to clean, haul, dig and sweat.

The Timpview High students had their hair curled and heels on (they're both on the school ballroom dance team), a far cry from the picture of rough-and-tumble humanitarian aid workers.

"It was hard work," said Mauzy, who will attend BYU in the fall. She put in 10-12 hour workdays, six days a week, for three weeks, working alongside over a hundred other volunteers from BYU. "I don't think I've ever worked harder in my life."

But, she adds, "It was so worth it."

The two are part of a growing number of LDS high school students doing humanitarian work abroad and coming back with a completely new perspective on life.

Another volunteer in Thailand was Leilani Roberts, then a senior at Orem High School. The now-BYU freshman, who was the first freshman in MWC history to win the 100-yard freestyle individual title, gave up her swim training to serve with Wave of Hope, a service brigade organized by BYU students. She said it was the most important thing she's ever done.

Then there's the Mountain View senior class, which chose to donate their class gift of $5,000 to HELP-International to give micro-loans to people hit hard by Hurricane Mitch.

And in 2000, approximately a dozen Salt Lake Valley high school students went to the Sacred Valley of the Inca in Peru with Warner Woodworth, BYU professor of organizational leadership. He said their maturity and work ethic motivated the older volunteers, and they've since been even more involved in fundraising to bless the Third World.

"These kids learn more, they watch CNN more, they get on the Web and see the extreme poverty in the world," Woodworth said. "Then they want to do something about it."

Seeing the suffering of God's children shocks them, and shock leads either to ignoring the problem or doing something about it, he said. Unlike the old priest or the bureaucrat who moved to the other side of the road and put on blinders, these kids are more likely to turn toward the victims like the good Samaritan did.

"They really are naïve enough to think they can do something to change the world," Woodworth said. "They are heeding their desire to bless our Heavenly Father's children who suffer and have so little."

As these youth help empower the poor and develop dignity in people around the globe, they too are raising their sense of dignity. Woodworth said that in a number of instances, inactive young people have gone through tremendous spiritual growth by loving the poor and joining sacrament meeting services in other countries. Many returned home and served an LDS mission.

Mauzy said she is determined to serve a mission after her experience and heard a lot of guys in Thailand say they wished they had gone and done something similar before their mission.

Woodworth said he sees these kids seizing upon the prompting to do good and they are becoming dedicated to lifelong service to empower the poor.

"I think there's this great, expansive, global spirit of humanitarianism that I personally believe is tied to the light of Christ," he said.

The spirit is evident to John Hatch, the founder of village banking methodology - that is, the giving of micro-loans to the poorest of the poor, a practice now embraced by hundreds of organizations worldwide. He said young people will be the ones to change the world

"You will be in charge of our society twenty years from now. That's why your consciousness has to start now," Hatch said to microfinance practitioners gathered from around the globe at the 2006 BYU-hosted Conference for Economic Self-Reliance. "You're not going to tolerate a world where poverty still exists."

Copyright Brigham Young University 5 May 2006