An army of 23,000 Lutheran youth aged between 14 and 20 descended on New Orleans this weekend, to carry out over 100 community service projects. I covered the story at the Times Picayune, which ran the piece on the front of today’s Metro section.

There’s some really nice quotes in the story, but I particularly liked the closer, from a girl who came to New Orleans from Boca Raton:

Kathryn Singkornrat, 14, from Boca Raton, Fla., perched 10 feet up a stepladder, getting her tanned arms covered in sweat and white paint chippings as she scraped the side of Jackson’s house clean.

“I’m really excited that we can actually make a difference to somebody’s life,” she said. “Boca Raton is a very different environment from New Orleans; it’s very clean and nobody walks on the street like they do here. But right now, this place really needs our help. And Boca Raton is perfectly fine without us.”

Very nice pictures by Eliot Kamenitz accompany the paper version of the story, too.