GOFFSTOWN --- When 16 Goffstown High School students arrived at the South Florida city of Lake Worth as volunteers with Habitat for Humanity, they had a lot more in store than just hanging siding and painting walls.

The trip would turn out to be a study in contrasts, one these kids are unlikely to forget anytime soon.

Taylor Giammarino, the senior who conceived and organized the trip, said one night the group witnessed a 90-mph car chase rip through the neighborhood where they were staying and working.

“I was, like, 'Oh my gosh, we're going to get caught up in a shootout or something,'” she recalled.

The group arrived on Sunday, April 22, and stayed until the following Saturday. By day, the students and the teachers who accompanied them worked on six different houses — painting, framing, priming, landscaping and roofing, as well as performing other tasks.

Teacher Ian West, one of the chaperones who accompanied the students to Florida, said it wasn't only what the group saw that was surprising, but also how well the kids handled it.

“The way the community is set up is like you literally cross some railroad tracks and you are in the land of Mercedes Benz and Bentley and all these big houses,” West said. “And — I'm not even kidding — you go on the other side, and it's fairly impoverished.”

West said most Goffstown kids only see that on TV. “But then, all of a sudden, this is what it's really like.”

The kids' volunteer work added to the effort that has built some 500,000 Habitat for Humanity homes for qualifying families worldwide. According to Habitat's website, in addition to a down payment and monthly mortgage payments, homeowners are required to invest hundreds of hours of their own labor into building their Habitat house and the houses of others.

Darren Hartung was another teacher/chaperone. He explained how local contractors are hired out to coordinate the volunteers who come in from all over the country.

“We basically just showed up with coffee in our hands in the morning,” Hartung said with a laugh.

The students hit it off with the contractors supervising the project. They plugged in their iPods and sang the workdays away, then headed off to hit the Atlantic Ocean after the days were through.

“It was fun,” Hartung said. “The kids learned a lot, and most of them had never really picked up a hammer before.”

It wasn't only the students who worked, but the four teachers who accompanied them, as well.

“They kind of conned us into it, saying, 'You just have to supervise. You guys don't have to do anything,'” Hartung said.

The trip cost about $16,000. Most of the money — about $12,000 — came from fundraising; the students and teachers were responsible for the rest.

Giammarino said the trip was inspired by her uncle Chris Nutile, who died in January 2011.

“He was a humanitarian,” she said.

And it was the humanitarian work of helping the people of Lake Worth that proved the most memorable part of the trip. The greatest reward, Giammarino said, was in seeing what the neighborhoods and houses where they'd worked looked like at the end of the week, compared with how they had looked when the Goffstown group arrived.

“It was awesome,” she said.

Now Giammarino hopes that after her graduation, successive classes of Goffstown High students will take up the Habitat for Humanity banner and make a volunteer trip an annual tradition.