This week, more than 60 people have converged on the county to help a family in need.

The North Carolina Friends Disaster Service is working on a home on Community Building Road in Ararat to help rebuild from a fire nearly two years ago.

The service works to build or repair homes for families of various faiths who have lost their home in some kind of disaster. It is associated with the North Carolina Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. And this week, the lucky winner of their services is a local family of four.

The Goins family is not the only one benefiting from this team, which includes 25 students from Guilford College. When coordinators arrived to check out the site, they noticed that a neighbor’s roof was in disrepair as well. The elderly homeowner could not do the repairs herself so the crews saw the opportunity to extend an additional helping hand. A crew of college students ascended ladders and spent the day on Monday making the roof ready for winter.

Watching these crews at work, seeing them hammering boards, hanging sheetrock and attaching siding and seeing how much fun they seemed to be having, made me want to grab a hammer and pitch in.

Seeing them at work made me remember doing similar projects while I was in high school with the Appalachia Service Project. For one week in the summer, we would pile into vans and head to a remote location in Virginia or Kentucky or Tennessee or West Virginia. We would sleep on the floor in a school gym or classroom and eat questionable food. And we would work on homes in the area in need of repair. We worked on roofs and whole rooms. We built porches and retaining walls.

All in all, it was one week per summer. It was just a few repairs on a handful of houses. But to the people in those houses, it was the world. That feeling of watching someone’s face as their dreams begin to come true, as they realize that this winter they will be warm and dry and a little bit safer, that is what made a difference for me. That is what kept me going back.

I know that the crews working on the house this week will experience that same feeling when they step back at the end of the project and see a home where before there was a half-completed house.

It is not only groups that come from out of town who help people in this community realize their dreams. All too often, we place emphasis on the people who travel from other parts of the country to work on houses in this community. But there are people right here who do that every day. Volunteers work with Habitat for Humanity year round to ensure that as many families as possible can be provided with a home. Often, their efforts go unnoticed by all but a few. It is only the people who directly benefit from their work that really appreciated what is done.

It is great when people come into the community to help out, but it is important that we also recognize the unsung heroes of this community who work hard regularly to see that same smile of gratitude, that same expression that comes when dreams are realized.

Morgan Wall is a staff reporter for The Mount Airy News. She can be reached at mwall@mtairynews.com or 719-1929.