ENCINITAS - Volunteering amid the wreckage and despair that remains in Hurricane Katrina's wake, has led an Encinitas merchant and some of her employees to reassess their own lives.

Crystal Wells, owner of Detour Salon & Store on South Coast Highway 101, has volunteered for the Habitat for Humanity charity for more than a year.

Her first assignment was "gutting" houses - stripping the molding carpet, drywall, furniture and nearly everything else from the flood-damaged buildings for disposal.

"Maybe it's because I was a Girl Scout," Wells said this week of her decision to leave the comforts of Encinitas. "I went there for a week and called back and said I wanted to do more.

"I couldn't believe more people weren't helping," Wells continued. "It seemed so important to me."

More recently, Wells has taken a job coordinating the efforts of hundreds of Habitat for Humanity volunteers rebuilding St. Bernard Parish, where mile after mile of neighborhoods were destroyed after the flooding of August 2005.

Wells arrived in February 2006, and a year later she bought a home in Old Arabi, a few blocks from the Mississippi River. There's a big oak tree in the backyard; she said she already knows many of her neighbors.

Wells returned to Louisiana earlier this week after a brief visit to her home and business in Encinitas.

As her 44 employees style hair and sell merchandise at the bustling salon, Wells is back at work in what once was Willie Smith School, a building Habitat for Humanity uses as an operations hub.

"I think everyone (at Detour) appreciates everything Crystal's been doing," said Stacy Cowart, a manager at the salon, "but we miss her."

One year ago, Cowart learned firsthand about the toil and rewards of volunteer work.

Like her boss, Cowart donned protective clothing and a respirator, wielded demolition tools and gutted houses.

It was her first experience with manual labor, she said, and the job entailed dodging rats and snakes.

"The thing going through your head is that families lived there," Cowart said. "Half the time you have tears in your eyes."

Workers would salvage photographs and mementos. Most everything else would end up on the waste heap.

The volunteer work has driven Cowart to take stock of her own life and how she handles problems.

The scheduling conflict, the impatient customer, the telephone call that just can't wait - she said she knows not to sweat the small stuff.

She also has "simplified" her own home.

"Seeing everything people had lost made me ask 'What do you really need?'"

With Wells as their point person, Cowart and her co-workers last December sent gifts to children in Louisiana.

A call to the Habitat for Humanity headquarters in St. Bernard Parish on Friday reached Kelly Donohue, 21.

The volunteer from Michigan had set out backpacking last April and a stop in the ravaged Gulf Coast region turned into a year's stay.

So much remains to be rebuilt, she said, a reality people can't understand until they have seen it with their own eyes.

Like Wells and Cowart, Donohue said the volunteer work has changed her life.

"I wasn't sure what I wanted to do," she said. "Suddenly I have this passion and fire. I'm happier and healthier."

- Contact staff writer Adam Kaye at (760) 943-2312 or akaye@nctimes.com.