Five Seycove secondary students sprawl around an outdoor table at a Parkgate coffee shop in July.

They are alternately withdrawn and passionately outspoken. They finish each others' sentences, but also pause to ensure that each has finished speaking before adding their own answers to questions. They might appear relaxed to a passerby, but they are fidgety, even intense. They are having trouble adjusting to the good life in North Vancouver.

They teens are just about to begin Grade 12, and one might expect them to be living it up in the summer sun, partying with their friends for the 10 weeks they have free before their graduation year.

But then misconceptions about teens abound. Certainly these kids have all seen sun recently, but Kyle Randall, Cole MacCara, Sanna Welyk, Darcy Smith and Kate White spent almost all of their 10 days in the Dominican Republic working for others.

In total, 26 Grade 11 and 12 students from Seycove joined other Canadian and U.S. students to work on five humanitarian building projects: three house builds, a basketball court for a Canadian-sponsored school, and garbage picking with Haitian refugees.

Their bodies have been back in Canada for six days, but their minds are still in the Dominican Republic.

Randall and MacCara bought simple leather and bead bracelets to remind them of their holiday. "I'm going to keep it on till it falls off," says Randall.

The bracelets are tangible reminders, something they can touch as the memories of their experiences on the island of Hispanola in the Caribbean begin to fade in the face of insidious Canadian comforts, and family and friends who didn't make the trip.

"The first day I got back, I woke up, sat on my couch and just felt so useless, like I needed to be doing something -- shovelling or something," says MacCara.

"It just felt like it wasn't time to leave. I came home and I didn't want to be here. I wanted to be out there helping, carrying buckets of cement," adds Welyk.

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The Dominican Republic is the second largest Caribbean nation (Cuba is the largest). Its 48,442 square kilometres (18,704 square miles) occupy the eastern two-thirds of the island it shares with Haiti.

Home to approximately 10 million people, the DR economy was once driven by sugar but is now considered to be "service driven," as the country has become increasingly a tourist destination. Almost 10 per cent of its population is estimated to be of Haitian origin, but numbers are hard to pin down as the DR both gains and loses large numbers of migrants. The Central Intelligence Agency's The World Factbook notes the country has "marked income inequality." In fact, the money that DR emigrants send home is estimated by the U.S. State Department to account for one-tenth of the country's gross domestic product.

"Income inequality" is a meaningless phrase to the Seycove kids.

"It's hard to describe," says Welyk. "You see pictures and video, but once you are actually living it, it's completely different."

White says when she got back to her room in Canada, her first instinct was to sell her bed. "We have too much stuff we don't need. Way too much."

They've been well debriefed. They know they should be appreciative of what they have in Canada and not feel guilty. They also understand that they cannot make their friends experience what they experienced, and that their friends should not be resented for not experiencing it too. But they all talk of the dislocation of returning.

Welyk says she had difficulty processing her dad's and brother's account of their holiday in Whistler in which they got invited to a "mansion" to eat lobster and crab. "And this was, well . . . while I was saving lives."

There's a pause and Randall says quietly, "I think I speak for everyone when I say we're all still adjusting."

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The trip to the Dominican Republic was a "Hero Holiday," the brainchild of a not-for-profit Canadian charity founded in 2000 called Absolute Leadership Development whose stated vision is "to empower emerging generations to change their world by living their lives with purpose."

Absolute offers a one-year school of leadership to those who want to make a difference in the world. To interest teens, they make school presentations and offer working holidays at projects in Mexico -- Carson Graham students spent 10 days in July building homes in Vicente Guerrero -- Thailand, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

In the Dominican Republic, two 10-day visits involving anywhere from 60 to 120 students each are offered in July with an intern program running through both dates. A week-long university student holiday is offered in August.

The holiday is all-inclusive, with meals, snacks, DR travel and accommodation at a three-star, beach-side resort provided -- though that sounds somewhat grander than the reality

The teens were staying four to a room, the air conditioning didn't always work, the water from the tap was not safe enough to be used for brushing teeth, and the toilet paper had to be disposed of in the garbage.

Andrea Yeo, planning department head at Seycove and the organizer of the trip, says there wasn't a single complaint.

"It's one of those things where you don't want to complain; you just want to suck it up, because you have food, water, showers and they don't have anything," says Welyk.

"There we are getting three meals a day and snacks in between, and then we go to hand out food and one of the kids will say, 'No it's not my turn, it's my sister's turn.' And then it hits you," adds White.

The holiday cost $3,500, but the students worked hard for more than six months to raise funds for the trip. Donations included extra supplies that would be given away or used while they were there.

Some parents went as chaperones. Two of them raised separate funds for windows and a door for the house they would build while in San Marcos. Windows in these cinder-block and cement homes are considered a luxury.

Hero Holiday has focused its efforts on the areas around Sosua and Puerto Platas, along the north shoreline of the country, working with both the Dominican and Haitian communities.

Since 2005, Hero Holiday has helped to construct two schools, several houses and a medical clinic. It has facilitated sports camps, community parties, free medical clinics and health seminars. Each participant rotates through the current project sites in order to play a part in all of the work that is being done there.

The Canadian kids worked on three different house-builds, spent a day of back-breaking pick-and-shovel work trying to level out ground for a basketball court at a Canadian-sponsored school, and worked beside Haitian refugees looking for recyclables at a garbage dump. They sweated so much in the 34 C heat and high humidity that they drank 8-12 litres of water a day -- and, they point out, they weren't taking bathroom breaks.

Seven out of the 26 Seycove kids on the trip came back from the trip and signed up to sponsor a child's education at the school. Thirty-nine dollars a month buys a uniform, school supplies and helps to pay a teacher's salary. Welyk has chosen a girl who is five. She intends to support her until the girl graduates. Both the Canadian students and the Dominicans themselves understand that education is the only escape from a life of poverty so desperate that children spend their days combing garbage for recyclable plastic and metal.

One of the house-builds they worked on was in the town of Agua Negra. The town sits in the shadow of a huge open garbage dump and on the banks of a river that is polluted with more refuse, dead animals and sewage.

"Their beach isn't sand or rocks, it's garbage -- and that's where they are fishing and crabbing," says Randall.

"When it rains, their houses are filled with polluted waters up to their knees," says White.

The girls say mothers in Agua Negra stay up at night when it rains in order to fight the rats. Agua Negra translates to "black water," an apt name for a town whose water makes it sick.

Near the end of their trip, the students went to work with the mostly Haitian children who pick garbage for one or two dollars a day.

"It was just overwhelming," says Smith. "At all the other jobs, the kids were so happy to see you, and they were here too -- but you could tell their lives were way more difficult."

Hospital waste is mixed in among the household refuse. The kids who are combing the dump are mostly barefoot or wearing flip-flops. Cows wander amongst the refuse, leaving dung that is often stepped in. It's wiped off with garbage.

Smith was horrified to see a small boy emulating his older brother by picking through garbage and pretending to find something that was worth money.

The girls say the children think nothing of eating any food they find or checking juice boxes for any remaining liquid.

While at the garbage dump, the students gave the Haitian refugees a small bag of rice, a small bag of beans and some oil -- meant to last an entire family one to two weeks.

The Seycove teens speak as one in describing their reactions. The words "brutal," "ugly," "disgusting," all overlap.

Yeo says that as the work group drove away, almost all the Seycove kids burst into tears. "It really hit them hard.

"One Haitian said, 'Don't cry, my friends. This love. You have shown us love.' Wow!"

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Welyk had planned to go to Europe after graduating next year, but now wants her grad trip be back to the Dominican Republic with Hero Holiday as an intern for a month.

"I'd still like to go live in Portugal for a month, but I know I want to go back there and just see all the kids again."

The others add that they too want to go back as interns.

Randall hopes to go back next year and the year after. Like some of the others, he uses the term "life-changing" to describe the holiday and feels that future visits will help him to hold onto the ideals of helping and making a difference. He offers that "it might just be me talking now," but that he hopes it might shape him as a future parent.

Asked if they see themselves as atypical teens -- ones with a world awareness that their peers do not share -- they say they don't really think so. It doesn't seem like they are being modest.

They believe that social justice classes have pushed some of their peers into confronting poverty and other issues here in Vancouver, and point to the fact that many Grade 11 and 12 students at Seycove are already sponsoring African children.

If this is the next generation, it's maturing fast.

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Welyk's mother was one of the chaperones on the trip, and Welyk says not only did it bring them closer together, but it gave them mutual support when they got back to Canada. "Even now, it's so hard for me to explain everything that happened there, to put it into words.

"I'll say I want to keep building houses, and my dad's like, 'You can't save the world, Sanna,' and my mom'll back me up because she knows what the emotions are like and my dad doesn't."

Welyk says her mom has stopped going out to buy coffee every day as she used to because she too has been affected by what they experienced, and the embarrassment of riches they saw with new eyes when they returned -- riches that average Canadians take for granted.

Randall's father also went on the trip, and Randall says the time brought them closer together. Like Welyk, he says explaining the impact of the holiday to others is easier with two members of the family involved. In fact, Randall is pleased that his dad wants to take his mom either back to the Dominican Republic or to Hero Holiday in Mexico, and that his brother also wants to try the experience.

"It's branching out. It's so great to actually have that feeling: that it starts with one person and it grows and grows so that it really is making a difference."

Randall recounts a story told by one of the Hero Holiday leaders, Bill: A boy and his dad are walking on a beach where the tide is going out, leaving thousands of starfish stranded to be eaten by gulls or die in the sun. The boy runs down to the waterline and begins ferrying starfish back to the sea.

"What are you doing?" asks the father.

"I'm saving the starfish," replies the boy.

"Well, you're not going to make any difference," says the dad. "Look at how big the beach is and how many starfish there are."

The boy picks up another starfish, puts it in the water and says, "I made a difference to that starfish." He picks up another starfish, puts it in the water and says, "I made a difference to that starfish." He picks up another. . . .

"One by one," chimes in MacCara.

"Exactly," says Randall. "Even if it feels like we haven't really done that much, we made a difference to that one family, or that one community."