Price » Raising her hands to her lips, the 90-something Navajo woman gestures a simple "thank you."

Little else could be "said" between this grateful woman and a crew of College of Eastern Utah students who spent spring break not vacationing in Moab, Miami or Mazatlan, but volunteering on the Navajo Reservation in the Four Corners region.

The message resonated clearly between strangers who shared no common language, but an uncommon bond, after a week of ramp-building that enabled some residents to leave their homes for the first time in years without being lifted down their front steps into wheelchairs.

Among the young do-gooders were CEU sophomores Maren Hebdon and Mikenzi Bentley, who have devoted hundreds of hours to a lifestyle of love.

"When you see people like that [Navajo woman]," Bentley says, "you just want to help them."

And so they do, over and over again.

These students are making a quiet, but unmistakable, imprint as volunteers for CEU's Serving Utah Network (SUN) Center. They stuff trick-or-treat bags with food for the poor, perform Sunday music for a Price nursing home and host soup-and-bread fundraisers that generate thousands of dollars annually for a food bank.

It's about gratitude, they explain, for their lives -- ones not burdened by hunger, homelessness or disability but blessed by comfortable homes, caring families and a commitment to serve.

"It's just good to be able to lift other people," Hebdon says. "The little things can change so much overall. Just one little candle can light so many other little candles."

It's the little things that inspired them not so many years ago: like the late-night lawn-mowing outings when Hebdon's family members would push-mow their slumbering neighbors' yards and the hands-off suppers that Bentley's mom would prepare for neighbors in need. It was the Christmases in which Hebdon's parents asked her to make (not buy) presents for her siblings and the example of service shown by Bentley's mother who "may have a million other things on her plate and still says, 'Yeah, I'll do that.' "

So this sister-like duo reaches out -- a lifestyle that has left both with the title of president (Hebdon as head of the SUN Center's student volunteers and Bentley as steward over her LDS congregation's Relief Society program).

Hebdon, 20, has orchestrated the SUN Center's hunger banquet, which separated guests into first-, second- and third-world dinner parties to demonstrate the stomach-gripping disparities of wealth and resources in the world. She has spearheaded a trick-or-treating-for-food campaign in Price that yielded 2,400 pounds of canned goods for the food bank and helped direct a series of soup-and-bread fundraisers that provided the pantry with more money for supplies.

Bentley, 19, plans to oversee this year's alternative spring break to the Navajo Reservation. She already has written enough grants, and made enough presentations, to raise nearly $7,000 -- a sum that CEU Director of Career and Volunteer Services Kathy Murray describes as "all her."

"It is such a productive way to spend spring break," Bentley says. "You could go on a road trip. But what good would that do?"

That do-good attitude inspires Murray.

"You hear about all the things that are going bad [in the world]," she says. "But you spend a few minutes around these guys and everything is great. It gives you hope for the future and for the world."

jstettler@sltrib.com