There's nothing like finding a reminder of home, especially in a pile of rocks.

Ozi Utah came back from her work on the Scout cabin rock pile this afternoon with a big smile on her face.

“Guess what I found?” she asked as her smile grew even bigger. She held up a piece of mortar she chipped from one of the stones.

All of us in the fellowship hall at the church shrugged. No clue, we said.

“Nigeria!” she said, beaming. “It’s shaped like Nigeria! I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.”"

Could have fooled us — all of us.

Ozi is from Nigeria. She says the piece is shaped like her home country.

Patrice Hein, another graduate student who worked on the rock pile with Ozi and snapped her photo, likened Ozi’s discovery to finding an image of Jesus in a potato chip.

I’m not sure Ozi will be able to cash in on her discovery on eBay, but she likely wouldn’t part with it anyway. I’m willing to bet it’s going to occupy a prominent place in her home or office.

Ozi's home does resemble the piece of mortar she fished from the rock pile.

Courtney Looney, left, and Courtney Crain chip mortar from stones at the old Boy Scout cabin.

One of the requirements for the Greensburg class is for students to volunteer. Most have concentrated on getting interviews and writing, so the latter part of this week has been filled with work in the community.

They’ve volunteered in different ways. One student painted signs. Another mowed vacant lots with an Oklahoma group also staying at the church. One with more talent than most of us played piano during the noon hour at the nearby senior citizen center. Some worked on a deck for a homeowner, another helped a previous story source — an 87-year-old widow— clean her house and still others spent part of today on a rock pile.

The rocks are from the old Boy Scout cabin that was destroyed in the tornado. Scout officials plan to try to use the stones again.

I offered to download the sound track from “Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?” for the group cleaning mortar off the rocks. Someone joked that the class really started resembling prison this week.

WSU grad student Ozi Utah entertains residents of the Carriage House in Greensburg.

Take Georgia Abrams, for example. She’s an intern with GreenTown in Greensburg and has been attending Indiana State, but is transferring to Kansas State University this fall.

Georgia, who is staying in the basement of the Methodist Church with our group, is back for her third stint in Greensburg. She loves it here, she says.

Georgia has a lot of attributes. But the one that caught reporter Sarah Garia’s attention: She can put a quarter in her bellybutton. (Don’t try this at home.)

Sarah wanted to get a photo of her formerly hidden talent. A Georgia state quarter would have been perfect. We looked in our pockets and purses. We came up with quarters from New Mexico, Minnesota, Arizona, Maryland and several other states. But wouldn’t you know: not a Georgia quarter to be found in the building.

It's not a requirement for interns at GreenTown, but Georgia Abrams can hold a quarter in her bellybutton.

Bill Johnson, the ever-present volunteer, is still helping in the Greensburg area. He’s staying in Haviland at a rental house he remodeled between mission trips with the United Methodist Church. Like Bill says, they’ll even let a Lutheran go along.

Bill recently returned from a mission trip to Nebraska, and in mid June he and the Methodist work team will go to an Indian reservation in South Dakota to work. He says volunteering keeps him going.

For the rest of the coffee drinkers, it was another morning before work, or whatever they had planned for the day. All the regulars, however, will be ready for Vic when he returns from vacation. He’ll hear plenty about the store running out of biscuits and gravy.

Evan Evans takes a break from making waffles for volunteers from his Nebraska church working this week in Greensburg.

Evan Evans calls himself a helper — “a Martha,” a worker in the Biblical sense.

Evans, 68, and his wife Bonnie are among a group of 47 volunteers from Ainsworth United Methodist Church in Nebraska. The high school students and adult sponsors have been in Greensburg all week, performing what Evans calls handyman jobs at an average of five homes each day.

This is the second summer that Evans and the mission-minded Ainsworth church group made the seven-hour trek to Greensburg. The year before, they went to Slidell, La., to help after Hurricane Katrina.

Evans is an optometrist in real life. He’s owned and operated his office in Ainsworth for 42 years. He’s a native of Iowa, but attended college at Ottawa University in Kansas, where he played football and basketball.

Besides helping people, Evans repairs and restores antiques, and makes furniture. His favorite creation is a tulip table made of maple, walnut and cherry wood. “Try to mix those three together and come out right,” he jokes.

The Ainsworth volunteers took a break Thursday night and went rollerskating in Pratt, 30 miles east of Greensburg. Evans didn’t go, though. He said he’s smart enough to know not to try skating at his age. Besides, he added, he has a bad back, and he’s still recovering from falling off a ladder and breaking one of his heels. He said he took enough guff after that episode.

Our caravan from Wichita State arrived in Greensburg shortly after 10 a.m. There are 19 of us. Most are from Kansas, but there are two from Iowa and one from Lagos, Nigeria. Everyone, though, has heard of Greensburg.

We’ll be staying in the Greensburg United Methodist Church with Methodist volunteers from Ainsworth, Neb. Another group of volunteers from the Methodist Church in Erie, Kan., is staying across the street in someone’s basement, but eating meals here, too.

We’re staying in three Sunday school rooms. Some of the women are sleeping in the luxury suite — the nursery.

Our media room is set up in the parlor. We’ll have to be out early Friday afternoon because there’s a wedding in the church on Saturday. Fortunately, the church has Internet access, so we can work everywhere in the church — except the basement.

We have a tour with Matt Deighton, a Greensburg native and unofficial mayor of Volunteer Village. His job ended the last of March, but he offered to show us around.

We’ll start on our stories later today. All our work will appear on greensburgrebirth.com.

If there’s one person in Greensburg that everyone — especially the volunteers — likes to see coming, it’s Elma Hellwig. Especially if she’s got a cardboard box of her made-from-scratch cinnamon rolls in hand.

The 86-year-old, who lives in a FEMA trailer while her new home is being built, has a long history of baking tasty treats. Elma used to produce all the baked goods for Burke’s Restaurant in Greensburg. She might have been the secret to the restaurant’s success all those years.

A son of the original owners, Larry Burke, operates the Copper Oven in Wichita, also a successful restaurant. The baked goods — and the food —there are great, too.

Elma says she’d like to go to Burke’s restaurant some day. I told her she ought to surprise him with one of her famous cinnamon rolls to see if he has forgotten the melt-in-your-mouth taste. If he’s like most people, he hasn’t.

The conversation early this morning among coffee drinkers at the Haviland Hardware store focused on politics and weather.

The possibility of an Obama-Clinton ticket sparked comments among what seems to be a mostly Republican crowd. Clinton’s reported plan is to drop out of the presidential race, endorse Obama and ask for party unity to carry the Democrats to victory in November.

Clay Corbet said he can’t wait until the Obama bumper stickers come out so he can plaster hardware store owner Vic Hannan’s vehicle with them. Vic is the most vocal Republican supporter not only in the morning group, but likely in this part of the state.

Today’s forecast of possible nasty weather was a recurring topic. Half-joking, a couple of the coffee drinkers asked others as they came in if they had their fraidy hole cleaned out in preparation for predicted bad weather later today and tonight. It figures, Clay said of the forecast of even stronger winds than we’ve had since late Wednesday. Today is league golf day for some of them.

Eighty-something Clifton Clark, farmer and school bus driver for more than 50 years, got the biggest laugh of the day when he proclaimed that women and weather were two things men always talk about but can’t change. At least with the weather, he added, you can hope.

Conversation stopped momentarily just after that when Debbie Smitherman joined husband Dwight and the group at the big round table.

“Why is it,” someone asked, “that when a woman sits down it suddenly gets quiet?”

At church this morning, good friend Donna Schupp had our Sunday school lesson on patience and impatience. I tend toward the latter. I’m like the bumper sticker Donna cited: “Give me patience, Lord; and I want it now!”

The discussion on patience/impatience made me think about the people of Greensburg and others in surrounding communities who were hit by the May 2007 tornado. Those we interviewed and met last week seem to have amazing endurance, considering the hardships they suffered.

We’re not talking about being stuck in traffic or waiting in a long line at a store or the Department of Motor Vehicles. The people in the Greensburg area are trying to rebuild their lives, many with the help of hundreds and hundreds of volunteers who have come from all over the United States. A relative who was at a family gathering over the weekend asked me if the Greensburg downtown had been rebuilt. Patience, I told her. It’s only been a year.

Author M.J. Ryan wrote that “the more we see life as messy and unpredictable, and people bumbling through life the best they can, the more patience we bring to trying situations.” Life in the Greensburg area has been messy and unpredictable since the tornado. But I don’t get the sense of bumbling at all. What we’ve witnessed so far among those we’ve met is an extraordinary degree of patience and hope for a better future, despite trying times.

We look forward to hearing more of their stories and sharing them with you this coming week.

Bill Johnson admits he’s pretty much of an anomaly. He’s a loner, but he loves being around people, especially when he can lend a hand. He’s been doing plenty of that in recent months.

We interviewed Bill on Mulberry Street in Haviland, where he is remodeling a rental house. It might be rented to someone displaced by last May’s tornado in nearby Greensburg. The owner has been trying to get Bill to move into the house when it’s done. No doubt he and other people in Haviland would like to keep him around town. He’s truly a handyman.

A retired elementary teacher whose teaching career included a lengthy stint in El Dorado, Bill has been staying at the Haviland United Methodist Church while he’s been helping with construction and remodeling in the Greensburg-Haviland area.

His permanent home, if you can call it that, in is Kimberling City, Mo., not far from Branson. He pays a former fellow teacher $10 a day to stay there – when he’s back that way. If he had to, he adds, he could live in his pickup. He’s slept in it plenty of times.

Bill is volunteering to help refurbish the old white house. He came to Greensburg right after the tornado. And, except for a few other stints with a mission team from Calvary United Methodist Church in Wichita, he’s stayed in Kiowa County to help with rebuilding and remodeling.

My wife Nancy, who accompanied us this week on our class trip to Greensburg, started working with Bill today. She’s stripping wallpaper off the old plaster walls. She joked with one of the students at lunch that she was spending the day working in a strip joint.