On Aug. 15, 2007, an 8.0-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Peru, leveling swaths of the port cities of Pisco, Ica and Chincha. Hundreds of people were killed, thousands left homeless.

Matthew Mornick was in Miami at the time. A couple weeks later, he was on the ground in Ica, part of a UNESCO team brought in to build temporary schools.

''There was an unbelievable amount of dust,'' he said recently by phone from an Internet cafe in Cusco. ``It covers everything. It's everywhere. Every street you walk down, there are two piles: the brick, mortar and adobe where the house used to be; and the other pile of belongings they tried to salvage.''

Mornick was only 24, but not the unlikeliest choice for the team. He wants to be a city manager and as part of his prep plan, after graduating from Tulane University, he spent a year planning disaster response in Northern California. The year after that he had been a Coro Fellow in Los Angeles, rotating through a number of public service projects. He remembered a little Spanish from Coral Reef High School, and had improved it in Los Angeles.

He had another, less obviously useful skill as well, having won a 2001 Silver Knight award in Art for his portfolio of abstract photography.

For 50 years, The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald have presented the Silver Knight awards to high school luminaries in honor of their community service and academic excellence.

Winning that ''just blew me away,'' Mornick said. ``It gave me the confidence to do things I really love to do, [the feeling that] everything's going to be all right, everything's going to work out.''

And Mornick's photography skills turned out to be useful after all.

Peru's buildings had to be evaluated for structural damage; government agencies and nongovernmental organizations alike demanded documentation. Mornick went from artsy experiments with light and exposure time to shooting cracks in walls and foundations.

Resources and labor needed to be coordinated. Rubble needed to be removed. ''There wasn't a government capable of effecting immediate change,'' Mornick said. 'Their devastation was all-consuming. Life literally stopped. To the Peruvians' credit, they didn't wait even a minute to start rebuilding.''

When Mornick's 3 ½ months with the 18-member team was up, 78 temporary classrooms had been built.

Graduate school was waiting back in the United States, but Mornick had more he wanted to do: take pictures of a 100-year-old medicine woman he'd met in the mountains; work with a wilderness foundation in Chile; trek back north when it was all done -- the trek alone would take four months.

Mornick sent an e-mail a couple weeks ago: ``Finally settled into the south of Chile after my first week working in the Patagonia. It was breathtaking. I am working with the Wilderness Foundation in Puerto Varas, Chile . . . Though it is hard to imagine what will follow in the next five months, I am excited for what lies ahead.''