"You strong girl, strong girl," the short, smiling Asian woman says to Louise and me. She hands us two yellow and green fruits about the size of apples, but with squash-like skin. We’re sitting in the shade of this woman’s fruit stand, somewhere between Tahoe National Forest and Yuba City, California. While eating our strawberries and lemon cucumbers, we exchange stories with the woman and her husband. They came here from Laos in 1982 and now they drive an hour from Sacramento every day to man their fruit stand. Louise and I are cycling through on our way to San Francisco. As we get up to leave, the couple hands us two bags of lemon cucumbers with their repeated blessing: "God be with you!"

God certainly had been with us since we started our 10-week, 4,000-mile trek from Annapolis, Md. We were two of 28 students who cycled cross-country this summer on the southern route of a trip called "Bike and Build." When we met for our orientation in Annapolis, we discovered ourselves to be quite an eclectic bunch: folks from New York, Alabama, Chicago, Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, all with different experiences of college, family and religion, yet all with a common motivation: building homes for and with those in need.

Offering four trips this summer, "Bike and Build" is a nonprofit organization based in New York that aims to raise awareness and action for affordable housing through its cycling trips. Once we dipped our back tires into the Chesapeake Bay, we didn’t stop biking and building until our front tires were wet with the waters of the San Francisco Bay 10 weeks later.

As we cycled up and over the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Smokies, the Ozarks, the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas, we stopped at a new town each night, oftentimes sharing a meal with a church congregation that had generously given us food and a floor to sleep on. We spoke to them about the 30 million people who live in substandard housing conditions in the United States, and we described the situation of over 11 million people who live in worst-case scenarios: no plumbing, no electricity, over crowding or spending more than a third of their income on their housing.

We also told them how we had met and worked alongside the people who embody these statistics. About once a week, we took a break from cycling to work with Habitat for Humanity and other affordable housing groups. Through Habitat, home ownership is made possible by a no-interest mortgage, volunteer labor and many donated materials. A Habitat family makes monthly payments and also invests at least 200 hours of sweat equity by building on their own and others’ homes.

We built these homes, with these homeowners, learning more about the affordable housing problem by talking with them. In Garden City, Kansas, we constructed front steps and a driveway for a single mother who had been living in a sod house with her children, in an area vulnerable to tornadoes. In Colorado Springs, we traded in our bikes for hammers and built an entire house.

We also heard stories of poverty, hardship and triumph from random folks met in gas stations and restaurants throughout the country. We learned about the gentrification, high property taxes and impossibly high interest rates that prevent even the hardest working low-income family from owning a home. And with Habitat and other affordable housing groups, I found an answer to the frustration and desperation: helping to shelter one another as fellow members of the Body of Christ should.

I attended three Arlington Diocesan WorkCamps in high school. Since then God has continually guided me through the Church in His call to shelter the homeless, and He’s molded me as a person in the process. My summers at WorkCamp taught me the power and value of a community that serves together. By focusing our attention outside ourselves, we were able to soak in the joy of serving as Christ did, finding an alternative to the burden of being image-conscious and self-centered. We also learned something surprising: the mission of WorkCamp was not to repair homes, but to minister to people — body and soul. On every build day this summer, I remembered how my St. Raymond of Penafort youth minister, Becky Maurer, encouraged us to talk with the residents of the homes we worked on, even if it meant putting down our hammers. Often, she reminded us, a resident needed companionship as much as a new roof.

WorkCamp sparked a desire in me that I couldn’t ignore. When I left for college, God guided me to a continued awareness of housing and poverty issues. Through a leadership position with the University of Virginia’s Catholic Student Ministry (CSM), I organized a home-repair spring break trip to Hurley, a once-stable southwest Virginia mining town, which had been devastated by flooding and economic hardship.

Later in college, I went with a friend on a service retreat to Nazareth Farm, a Catholic home-repair agency in West Virginia. I immediately was attracted by the simple lifestyle. We forsaked television, radio and video games in favor of board games and good conversation. We were encouraged to remember that the water we use and the food we eat are resources given to us by God to be used wisely, and we were challenged to give up makeup and hair gel, iPods and trendy clothes for one week in order to see each other a little more clearly as brothers and sisters serving alongside Christ.

After my third trip to Nazareth Farm, I knew this lifestyle was for me. Beginning in January 2006, I will spend a year there as one of eight full-time volunteer staff persons. It has been such a joy and curious adventure tracing God’s guidance to this point in my life. From WorkCamp to CSM, from "Bike and Build" to Nazareth Farm, my God and my Church have called me to work for and learn from those who need homes.