The yellow school bus rumbled up the two-lane highway in Nicaragua with its cargo of 28 Americans.

Photos by BEN GRAY/Staff (ENLARGE)

Grady York (at top), a psychology teacher at North Gwinnett High, prays with members of his church during a mission trip to Nicaragua.

(ENLARGE)

Mike Meuse (above) takes a break from digging a latrine as Scarleth Sulema Flores, 5, offers water.

UPDATE The families of Villa Catalina are in their homes now, but Amigos for Christ will continue to work in the village. Next year the group plans to build a second school building, a church, and a health clinic, all with residents and American missionary labor. Amigos, a nondenominational, nonprofit group based in Buford, is also planning to build 17 small clinics in rural Nicaragua, says director John Bland. Information on donating and volunteering is available at the Amigos Web site: www.amigosforchrist.org. RELATED LINK: • Audio slideshow: On a mission: Villa Catalina

Grady York — schoolteacher, father of three, first-time missionary — sat in an aisle seat, bouncing his leg in anticipation. After months of planning and praying, he was finally on his way.

Packed in his suitcase were sunscreen for his shaved head, a week's worth of North Gwinnett High School T-shirts, and his grandmother's red, leather-bound Bible. She had raised him and guided his faith, so he was bringing her along, symbolically, for a week of building houses for the poorest of the poor.

At 39, Grady hadn't seen much of the world. He'd grown up in Atlanta, gone to the University of Georgia, married and moved back to Gwinnett County to raise his family. He formed a triangle with his fingers: If each side was 60 miles, that was the area in which he'd spent his entire life.

Grady's reasons for going on the trip were complicated. He wanted to be an inspiration to his three young daughters, and to his other kids, the students at North Gwinnett High School, where he teaches advanced-placement psychology and coaches football.

His friends kidded him that he was having a spiritual midlife crisis, only instead of getting a sports car, he was going on a mission trip. He saw it as a chance to gain some perspective on his pursuit of the American dream.

"I get the degree, I get the job, I get the house, I get the car, I get the family," he said, "but then I'm still not happy."

He wanted to find out what was missing in his life, and he also wanted to demonstrate his deep Christian faith to others; to be, as he and others put it, "the hands and feet of Christ."

So he'd come 1,450 miles, to rural Nicaragua, with his wife, Joy, as part of a group of 28 missionaries from his church, Sugarloaf United Methodist in Duluth.

Grady was the consummate psychology teacher, always forming questions, processing his thoughts out loud. "There's people on this trip who are very successful by the world's standards, but they spend $1,000 to come down here and dig latrines for other people," he blurted out. "Why?"

In Nicaragua, he wouldn't always get the answers he expected. But he would receive answers, some of which challenged his initial reasons for going there. Before the week was over, what he saw would make him think differently about God, and spark more questions about what he was doing with his life.

Faith as a foundation

After 2 1/2 hours on the road, the bus turned down a narrow street in Chinandega and stopped in front of a two-story hacienda. The Americans tumbled out into the house known as Casa Blanca. In the men's dorm room upstairs, Grady grabbed one of the coveted — cooler — lower bunks. Nothing could help the mattresses, though; some weren't much thicker than a Tom Clancy paperback.

Amenities in the house were nothing like life back in Atlanta's prosperous northern suburbs. There was no air conditioning. No hot water, ever, and even cold showers could be iffy. Because of water pressure, used toilet paper could not be flushed — it was to be thrown in trash cans. Everyone would do chores, including making the endless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that were the lunch staple for the week.

Downstairs, in the dining room, the missionaries gathered for a short orientation from their host, Amigos for Christ. The nondenominational charity based in Buford has led mission work in Nicaragua for seven years. Its main project for this group was Villa Catalina, a small village built from scratch in a field north of Chinandega. Like Habitat for Humanity homes, these have been raised by the Nicaraguans who live there, working side by side with American volunteers.

"These people have been building their houses for a year and a half," Kristin Monacella, a young Amigos staffer who'd just graduated from the University of Georgia, told the Methodists. "Technically, they don't need us to build these houses. They need us to be their friends."

After dinner, Grady and a few others found seats on the open-air front porch, where a cicada the size of a man's thumb noisily buzzed the overhead light and bats weaved in and out of the stucco arches.

Grady talked about his most important role, as the father of three girls: Savana, 10; Mackenzie, 9, and Taylor Grace, 6. He didn't tell the others he'd spent his own childhood in upheaval — that his parents divorced when he was 3, that his father had died when he was young, and that his mother was absent while he was raised by his grandparents.

As a kid, he'd sometimes felt as though there must be something wrong with him. But his grandparents, who adopted him, took him to a small, nondenominational church, and he'd felt God as a presence all his life.

His grandmother, Dot, always lived her faith, Grady felt. When she died of ovarian cancer in 1995, she was using her Bible to lead a study group from her hospice bed.

Leaning back on his cheap plastic chair, Grady told his friends about taking his oldest daughter to work in a soup kitchen in Gainesville. Savana watched a boy hungrily devour three bowls of soup, and asked her father why.

"I told her he was hungry," Grady recalled. "Really, really hungry. And you could see it in her eyes. Wow. She had never really thought that way."

After his tumultuous childhood, Grady and Joy had structured their family life to make sure their daughters felt secure and valued. Joy stays home with the girls, even though his teacher's income means living frugally. Before the couple left on the mission trip, Savana had asked her father why he was going.

"To make me a better person, to make me a better dad," he'd told her.

"It's always about you," she teased him.

Grady laughed. His daughter had him nailed.

Building a village

Monday morning, hot, bright and early. A rooster had crowed all night, and sleep had been fitful. But Grady was pumped.

"This is so cool!" he exulted.

Downstairs, the missionaries gathered to hear Kristin read an entry from her journal, to prepare them for the poverty they were about to see.

"It's not fair that we live such a privileged life. Who decided that we would be born into this, and not into a poverty-stricken Central American country that has struggled for centuries? We are not responsible for this. Therefore, we must be the hands and feet that were made to change it. We must be the face of grace."

The Americans piled onto a bus for the 15-minute ride to the new village, where Amigos' executive director John Bland greeted them. He was dressed in his standard work uniform — dirty, sleeveless Georgia Tech T-shirt, shorts, Tech baseball cap.

John and his wife, Sabrina, former Peace Corps volunteers, had first visited Chinandega in 1998. Seeing homeless families living next to the garbage dump, their children foraging for food, spurred them to start Amigos a year later. In 2004, they moved more than 100 families from the dump to land that Amigos had bought, the future site of Villa Catalina. Every summer, they bring their three kids — Annie, 16; Nidia, 14; Robert, 12 — to Chinandega.

The whole village is not much bigger than an American shopping mall. The school, library, warehouse (called the bodega) and water tower are clustered in the middle. Spread out around them are concrete block houses, each with a nearby concrete latrine/shower.

On the other side of a weedy field are champas, or tents, the families' temporary quarters. Wooden poles stuck in the ground are topped with sheet metal roofs and wrapped with canvas scraps, black plastic and old drywall to form walls. Floors are dirt.

Walking from the champas to the village, Grady had his head down, his brown eyes hidden behind his ever-present wraparound sunglasses.

"Man, look at this dirt!" he exclaimed. "It's so black. I wish I had dirt like this back home for my garden, instead of that Georgia red clay."

A co-worker walking with him teased, "Grady, these people have nothing and you have everything, and you come down here and covet their dirt?"

Grady burst out laughing at the absurdity. "You're right, I'm coveting their dirt!" he boomed. "I don't believe it."

Hard but rewarding labor

Outside the bodega, John passed out work assignments. Grady volunteered for latrine duty, and John explained to the diggers what he wanted. Each latrine hole had to be 16 feet deep. When the digger got too deep to toss the dirt overhead, it became a two-person job. The second person would lower a bucket to the digger, then haul the bucket up and dump it. Repeat, all day long, with temperatures in the mid-90s.

Shadowing Grady was a little girl who asked him, "Qué hora es?"

"Mi nombre es Grady," he replied, not thinking.

She grabbed his wrist, pointed to his watch and repeated her question slowly.

Grady's Spanish was better than that; he knew she was asking what time it was. But the combination of sensory overload and feeling off-balance in another culture made the mind go blank sometimes.

While Grady dug deeper, Katelyn Erben, 17, a high school senior from Birmingham, mixed cement in a large trough. Eventually it would be poured into molds and become the latrine floors, but first Katelyn and others, American and Nicaraguan, hauled 100-pound bags of cement and buckets of sand, small rocks and water to the troughs, then stirred them with shovels.

When the Nicaraguans working with her took a break, Katelyn walked across the village and joined a crew digging a latrine.

Katelyn was not a member of Sugarloaf, but her aunt and uncle, Judy and Walter Lindsay, were, and she had joined them on the trip. Even though she felt her spiritual path diverged from most of the Methodists', she knew she could match anyone at hard work. A self-described "girly girl" back home, she wanted to challenge her sense of herself.

On the bus ride back to the hacienda at the end of the day, Katelyn's workday was displayed on her legs — alternating layers of brown smudges (dirt from the latrine pits) and gray streaks (cement that had splashed up on her shins).

"I have a new appreciation of dirt," she joked.

Making it personal

Monday night after dinner, they arranged their chairs in a large, loose horseshoe. John turned off the lights and lit a candle.

The biggest problem among the missionaries who work with Amigos, he said, was fear. Fear of getting into something they can't get out of, fear of making an emotional commitment to these people that will, at parting, lead to sorrow.

"But this group," John said to the circle, "just throws themselves in. You guys bring something to the table that's very unique, and they recognize it. You look 'em in the eye, you hold their hand, you hug them.

"You take the time to dig a hole that they're going to crap in. It's humbling, and they know it."

Grady admired John's commitment and fearlessness, bringing his whole family to Nicaragua, living in these conditions three months a year.

I could never do that, he thought. He had too much invested in ensuring his family's stability.

'There was a purpose'

Two days later, instead of heading north to Villa Catalina, the school bus turned south to La Rota, a more rural region. The asphalt gave way to gravel as the missionaries headed to Sister Paula's farm.

The elderly nun ran an orphanage and hoped to build a drug treatment center for teens. She wanted to create an orchard on the farm and use the proceeds from the harvest to support her projects.

The plan was for the orphans to come from their home a half-hour away to help the Americans plant trees. But their bus broke down, the day frittered away, the children never arrived.

As a storm gathered in the distance, John called the group to devotion under a canopy of lime trees. Jackie Nangle wanted to tell her story.

Jackie, a soft-spoken 67-year-old who works for a Norcross realty company, attends Peachtree Corners Baptist Church in Norcross rather than Sugarloaf, so some of the others didn't know her well. Her voice was soft, and everyone scooted forward in the dirt to hear her, growing quiet in the twilight.

"I already have a favorite Bible verse, and it's 1 John 4:4," Jackie began. "But there's another verse I've been thinking about for the past two years, the one where God says I will never leave you or forsake you."

"Tonight," Jackie said, "I claim that verse as my own."

After returning home from her first mission trip to Villa Catalina in the summer of 2004, she had started getting severe headaches. Soon she had double vision, and in almost no time, she became blind in her left eye. In December, she underwent surgery.

Doctors removed a malignant tumor growing inside her sinus cavity. It was a very aggressive cancer, and she would have to undergo both chemotherapy and radiation.

"I had always said, if I ever get cancer, I will kill myself," she said softly, " 'cause I know what my mother went through."

Her co-workers formed the "Jackie Limo Service" to ferry her to and from her treatments. People she didn't even know signed up.

"I went through 53 radiation treatments," she told the group. "I went through 18 days of chemotherapy." She paused.

"I got to the point where I could not swallow. I could hardly even sip water. I lost 23 pounds."

The treatments continued through Christmas and into the spring of 2005. "God had his hand on me for the entire treatment."

Finally, she faced one more MRI. It would show whether any cancer cells remained.

"As I walked down the hall to the MRI, this verse kept going through my head," she said. " 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.' I felt this warm spurt move from my toes to the top of my head, and I knew they weren't gonna find anything. I knew God cleansed me."

The MRI showed she was cancer-free.

Under the canopy of trees, the only sound was farm children playing in the distance. Soft lightning flickered.

"I never once blamed or cursed God or said, 'Why me?' I knew there was a purpose."

That purpose was coming back to Villa Catalina to see the family she had met in 2004 and grown to love. "God willing," she said, "I'll be back next year."

As the storm moved in, the Americans piled onto the bed of a truck, and canvas tarps were tied around the steel rib frame. It was dark inside, and diesel exhaust funneled in. There was a nervous giddiness in the cramped quarters.

"Hey," Grady called out, "we're like illegal gringos being smuggled over the border." Everyone laughed.

Overcoming doubts

Dr. Lance Wiist, an OB-GYN who practices at Gwinnett Medical Center, walked to the Clinic San Martin de Porres on Thursday morning after breakfast. Even though he loaded rocks and washed dishes back at Casa Blanca like everyone else, he was the only physician on this trip, which meant he had another mission.

Dr. Lance, as everyone on the trip called him, scrubbed in for surgery. In the operating room, a young Nicaraguan had been prepped. He found a quiet spot in the corner of the room and prayed:

God, please don't let me screw up.

Then he returned to his patient and drew his scalpel across her lower abdomen.

On previous mission trips to Chinandega, Dr. Lance had done mostly first aid. This time, he had planned a procedure to help women with heavy menstrual bleeding. But women with more serious problems had come into the clinic. Some needed surgery, for fibroid tumors or hysterectomy.

Dr. Lance wasn't sure if he could do these more demanding surgeries. Back in Gwinnett, he had an entire team of nurses and anesthesiologists. The Clinic San Martin de Porres had almost no staff.

He had felt anxious, out of his zone. But Sabrina had told him Amigos for Christ would pay for the extra staff he needed. Now they surrounded him as he pulled a fibroid tumor the size of a softball out of the Nicaraguan woman.

Later, on the porch at Casa Blanca, Dr. Lance marveled at the way everything came together — the supplies, the staff. "I got the sense that God wanted me to do this," he said, "and at that point, the fear went away."

This was his third mission trip. Each had taught him something about himself, and God.

A humbling admission

For Thursday night's devotional, John lit the traditional candle and turned the floor over to Grady. He sat in the circle with his grandmother's red-leather Bible in his hand.

"All of us came down here for our own reasons," he began. "One of the reasons I'm here is I had a God-fearing grandmother."

Grady opened the Bible to Philippians 4:6 and read aloud: "Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Jesus Christ."

He closed the Bible.

"So many of us try to find peace on our own terms," he said. But true peace, he continued, comes from God.

He talked about meeting David, a worker at a concrete block factory nearby. "He spoke very little English, and I spoke very little Spanish," Grady recalled. "I asked him, 'How much do you make a day?' He said 80 to 100 córdoba." About $5 to $6 a day.

"This man was so upbeat, he was so happy. I could see it in his eyes, the warmth of his handshake, the smile on his face.

"And it made me go, 'Here I am in Atlanta, in this wonderful city, a great job, three healthy children, a good marriage, and I'm discontent.' "

Grady told the group he realized he had come to Villa Catalina "thinking I'm gonna bring my culture, I'm gonna bring Jesus, I'm gonna bring all these things to these people, and I'm gonna make their lives better. I came down here to fix the problems of Nicaragua ..." His voice started to crack.

"How utterly arrogant I was. How arrogant to say I wanted to be the hands and feet of Jesus.

"I tried to center this mission on what Grady can do, and the reality is what God can do."

He felt humbled, and the thought crossed his mind that this devotional was a kind of penance for his arrogance.

He had planned to bring Jesus to the villagers, and now realized that Jesus was already there.

A jolting image

Friday morning, John hustled Jackie and Grady out for a quick trip to the Chinandega dump. Most of the people they'd come to know during their week at Villa Catalina had once lived there.

The dump was vast and almost colorless — all grays and browns and washed-out whites. Skeletal cattle nosed through the trash, and dogs barked at them. Flies buzzed, thick and black, on the ground. Smoke rose from smoldering piles, and John said the people living there were constantly sick from burning tires and insecticides.

The Amigos van drove past a little boy, stark naked, rubbing his eyes in a shelter fashioned from plastic and cardboard scraps. The van stopped, and the Americans got out.

Jackie held a damp cloth over her nose and mouth. Grady exhaled a long breath and whispered, "Man."

In 1998, Hurricane Mitch, and the resulting mudslides, had left many families in Chinandega homeless, so they'd moved into crudely built champas next to the town's garbage dump. Every day the garbage trucks brought salvageable food, as well as metal and plastic that could be gathered and sold at the market.

A flatbed truck pulled in, piled high with debris. Kids rode on the bumper, not for a joyride, but to get a first shot at the garbage. Most of the youngsters were boys. One girl, about 10 years old, stood on the back of the truck, barefoot, in a ragged yellow skirt, tossing trash off onto the ground, looking for something of value.

On the ride back to Villa Catalina, Grady was silent, the first time in a week that he didn't offer a running commentary.

When they pulled into Chinandega, Grady found Joy, working next to a pile of concrete blocks destined to be somebody's home.

"I wasn't ready for that," he told her. "I thought I was ready for that, but I wasn't." He began to cry.

"I saw the boys and it didn't register on me. I saw the girl ..."

He trailed off, unable to talk.

"I just thought about where my girls are right now," he finally continued. "They're probably playing with the dogs, running around, and here's this girl on the back of this truck.

"Why? Why do we have so much and they have so little?"

Putting it in perspective

After an elaborate fiesta for the children of Villa Catalina on Friday afternoon came the farewells, time for the missionaries to give away whatever they had — food, backpacks, trinkets, clothing. Grady gave away his shoes, nearly all of his clothes, even his suitcase.

At devotion that night, in the darkened dining room, John asked Grady to talk about the visit to the dump.

"These children are eating food they find on the back of a truck," he told the group. "You think to yourself, 'That could be my daughter. But for the grace of God ... .' " He stopped, overcome for a moment, then resumed. "It's not.

"You cry out in your heart and say thank God, and you feel so guilty as you drive out."

John took over, explaining the history of the dump people. It was the sight of these families that had inspired Amigos for Christ. Some of those still living there had been offered a chance to be a part of Villa Catalina but had decided to stay. They had been afraid, he said, of not being close to their source of food. They were trapped at the dump by their own fear.

Though the group from Atlanta had plunged in and worked tirelessly, John knew they had arrived with their own fears.

"Realize how you lived this week," he told the group. "When you walked in the door here, there was fear. What if this guy snores? What if I stick my shovel in the ground and it doesn't go anywhere, it bounces back at you? What if I go back and tell my best friend about what this week was like, and they're not gonna get it?

"God wants you to enjoy life," he concluded, "and he wants you to live it completely fearlessly."

He was quiet, to let his words sink in.

Dr. Lance thought back on his anxieties earlier in the week. When he had realized what God was doing to make it work, the fear had melted away.

Jackie thought to herself that it was easy to talk about fearlessness now; it was going to be a lot harder when she had to go for her next MRI.

Grady's thoughts, of course, came in the form of questions. What's my dump? What's holding me back?

A child of divorce, adoption and turmoil, he had worked hard to secure his family's future. Because of what I went through, he thought, I don't want to mess up. I don't want to mess my daughters up.

That had meant always being there for them, having enough money in savings, not taking any risks.

But his week in Nicaragua had made him realize how many more possibilities life held. Maybe not taking risks meant missing out on something big. Maybe he and Joy and the girls were meant to be missionaries like the Blands, or blossom in some other direction.

If I really have faith that God is as big as he is, Grady told himself, he'll take care of my family.

His first mission trip had shown him that God's grace was greater than he had ever fathomed.