From the hilltop where Kevin Bardsley has stopped to rest, the children dancing in the village square are but silhouettes in the haze.

The dance below comes at the end of a daylong Christmas celebration known as "La Fiesta de los Ni os."

Culturally curious by nature, Bardsley would normally be among the group of broadly smiling Americans, laughing and snapping photos of the tiny performers.

But on this night, he is slouched in a plastic chair, perched on the edge of a muddy concrete pad that serves as the village's soccer field. A single light bulb strung from the rafters of the village schoolhouse projects a dim glow upon the tired man.

It might be a sad scene were it not for one thing: Bardsley is smiling.

It has been four months since 12-year-old Garrett Bardsley wandered away from his father during a Boy Scout camping trip in Utah's Uinta Mountains. It is widely accepted that Garrett is dead, his remains still hidden in that rugged range, buried now under yards of snow.

"The hardest thing for me through this entire experience was when the snow hit," Bardsley says. "When it did, I couldn't just accept it. I had to go up there and see it and touch it and to see how deep it was."

For a man stricken by grief and guilt - a man who says he often must pray for the strength to accept what he cannot control - it was a devastating blow.

To be certain, this small and impoverished village, high in the Andes, was an unlikely choice for Bardsley to come to look for his son.

But at this moment, as he sits 3,600 miles and two worlds away from the rugged spot where he last saw Garrett, Bardsley has come to an empowering realization:

He is closer than ever to finding the boy he lost.

"The fall would kill us": The dirt road leading to Puca Cruz offers stunning vistas of the colonial city of Cuenca, Ecuador's third largest and one of the nation's richest locales, where bright domes of Catholic churches punctuate a horizon filled with spires and ancient buildings.

By contrast, Puca Cruz is one of the nation's poorest communities. And one local nun, whose parish includes 20 such villages, calls the people of Puca Cruz "the poorest of Ecuador's poor."

That assessment is shared across denominations.

"I really don't know how these people survive," says Elder Bickmore, a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, stationed with his wife in Guayaquil. "I just don't know how they do it."

In a straight line - "as only God can travel," they say here - Puca Cruz is separated from its much more prosperous neighbor by no more than a few miles.

But the trip by truck over the steep and winding road connecting the two places takes 45 minutes. Travel by foot - none of the villagers owns a car - can take most of the day.

The significance of being so close, yet so far away, is not lost on village president Alberto Pugo.

"From here, we could tumble down to Cuenca," Pugo says, gesturing downward with several rolls of his wrist. "But the fall would kill us."

Pugo's home, a single square structure just off the road, is one of a handful of cinderblock dwellings in the village.

Brick homes are a luxury here; the rest are constructed of mud and thatch.

The villagers have no access to running water, let alone potable water. And although there rarely is a lack of vegetables in this fertile land, a lack of protein means malnutrition is rampant.

"He wanted to be here": Villagers recognized their needs were vast, but when visited by representatives of the Salt Lake City-based Engage Now Foundation this past fall, the locals pointed to a small structure at the top of the village as their primary concern.

The simple one-room schoolhouse was far too small to accommodate every student. Those who couldn't fit into the classroom had to walk two hours to the next nearest school, "or they just didn't go," says foundation CEO Carolyn Dailey.

To manage the issue, villagers had constructed a second classroom of scrap wood and cardboard.

"We wanted our children to have an education," Pugo says. "That was the best we could do for them."

Engage Now could not fix that problem immediately but promised to help villagers address the issue in time.

In the meantime, the foundation began laying plans for a Christmastime mission to Puca Cruz, were it would launch a long-term project intended ultimately to help scores of such villages.

A contractor by trade - and leader by disposition - Kevin Bardsley was pegged to lead the mission's construction team. The project would begin with Americans helping the villagers build new latrines and evaluating ways to bring clean water into the village.

It would be the Bardsley family's second expedition with Engage Now.

"No one was more excited about it than Garrett," Kevin Bardsley says. "He wanted to be here so much."

Benjamin Snarr would have thought no less of Kevin Bardsley if he had pulled his family out of the trip after Garrett's disappearance.

"He obviously had other things on his mind," says Snarr, a lanky 25-year-old college student who had worked his way up the foundation's volunteer ranks to become an expedition coordinator.

The trip to Ecuador was to be Snarr's first in such a position. As such, he felt obliged to prepare for the possibility of an expedition without the Bardsleys.

Heidi Bardsley, however, says there was never a question in her mind as to whether her family would go, even without her son.

"We all knew it was what Garrett would have wanted," she says.

Since snowfall halted the search - and having accepted even earlier that his son was no longer alive - Kevin Bardsley had been contemplating what kind of legacy his boy would leave behind.

What he learned is that legacies are not chosen, they are assigned.

Money donated to the Garrett Bardsley Foundation after the boy's disappearance exceeded the family's costs. And a $17,000 donation from Spanish Fork Middle School left the foundation awash in resources.

The money could buy a few days of search time in the Uintas, but in the Andes it could change a village's world.

The school could be built.

"We are going to finish this": Armed with the Bardsley Foundation's funds, Engage Now coordinated with Ecuadorean contractors to begin work on the school.

By noon on Tuesday, when the

Bardsley family stepped tentatively off a chartered bus onto a muddy plateau that serves as the village square, Garrett's memorial was nearly complete.

About 50 Engage Now volunteers - including the Bardsley family and more than a dozen close friends and extended family members - will depart Puca Cruz today after the dedication of two new schoolrooms, including a library stocked with text books donated by the family and the local LDS mission.

Engage Now missions are not designed to be simple, nor is the work intended to be completed solely by the visiting Americans.

"This is not our project," Engage Now's Dailey says. "This is their project, and we are here to help them accomplish it."

The nature of collaborative organization means the first days of each expedition are often disorganized. Such was the case in Puca Cruz this week when Americans arrived to work on the school with their Ecuadorean counterparts.

The lack of organization - and control - was frustrating for Kevin Bardsley. And for the first two days, the work on Garrett's memorial moved slowly.

On Wednesday afternoon, something happened: collaboration.

Dailey stood back and smiled. "This is the way it is supposed to work," she says as a line of Ecuadorean women and girls - some of them no taller than the school desks - and others moved large boulders intended to be used in the concrete work.

Kevin Bardsley, too, stood back to admire the process unfolding near his son's memorial.

"Oh my gosh," he says. "My gosh, we are going to finish this."

On the other side of the soccer field, Courtney Bardsley looked up at her father and sighed.

"He's doing so well," the 19-year-old Brigham Young University student says of her father. "He's come to the realization that he just has to accept what has happened, but that doesn't mean just sitting around. Not being able to go to the Uintas right now, this gives him something to do for Garrett."

"A pretty good legacy": The clouds have come, as they often will this time of night, and Kevin Bardsley's eyes follow the shapes of the children dancing in the village square.

He peers over his shoulder at the school that soon will bear his son's name as the "Puca Cruz Escuela en Memoria de Garrett Bardsley."

"We can do this again," he says. "We can do this again many times."

The family hopes to return to these cloud-covered mountains in July to celebrate Garrett's life by improving the lives of others. There is a school just up the road, in the small village of San Vincente, where children attend classes in a wood-frame room with plastic walls and a mud floor.

There is also interest in building a school for children over the age of 12, who currently have no local school.

"Garrett was a giving young man, and if there were anything he could do for someone else, he would," the grieving father says, tears running down his face. "We will never go back. Our lives have changed. And it is so much for the better.

"For a 12 year-old boy, this is a pretty good legacy."

mlaplante@sltrib.com

On the Web

l Engage Now,

http://www.engagenow.org/

l The Garrett Bardsley Foundation, http://www.findinggarrett.org/