Their first job Wednesday morning was to haul the cardboard boxes, which were as long as the kids were tall, to the middle of the gymnasium at St. Bernard of Clairvaux Catholic School.

JIM MAHONEY/DMN

Rachel Delgado adds an assembled chair to the pile ready for delivery at St. Bernard of Clairvaux school. The furniture will be donated to refugees as part of Mission Possible.

Then the two dozen or so sleepy-eyed parishioners sprawled out on the floor, tore open the boxes and began a task that has no doubt frustrated many a parent – assembling Ikea dining-room sets.

The kids were assembling the furniture for refugees arriving in Dallas from some of the world's most violent countries.

The furniture was St. Bernard's contribution to Mission Possible, a weeklong Catholic program that sends more than 1,500 kids on missions of benevolence around the Dallas area.

"It just really opens our eyes up to the problems going on – not just here, but all over the world," said Sara Elizabeth, a youth leader at St. Bernard, as she helped organize the gym-floor assembly line.

The purpose of Mission Possible, which is in its 15th year, is to give children the opportunity "to put into practice the social teachings of the Catholic faith," said the Rev. Doug Deshotel, vicar general for the Catholic Diocese of Dallas.

Those philosophical underpinnings may have been lost on some of the participants.

"My mama made me do it," said eighth-grader Alexandra Miranda, laughing, as she and friend Stacy Garcia carefully pressed together two halves of a wooden chair.

"I needed the service hours for my communion," admitted Hannah Reifsnyder, as she and another girl carried a finished table to the far side of gym. "But I didn't know it would be this much fun."

Regardless of why they volunteered, all the table-makers at St. Bernard said it felt good to help people who, as seventh-grader Aldo Rafael Muñoz Jr. put it, "come from war."

Catholic Charities of Dallas, which provides homes for the refugees, was happy to be one of Mission Possible's beneficiaries.

The organization, which will deliver some of the furniture today, normally has to scrounge up secondhand pieces of "varying quality" for the refugees.

"What's nice about these is they're sturdy," said Mike Auman, resettlement director for Catholic Charities. "I've had less-nice things than these as a young married person. It really gives people a feeling of home."

Mission Possible made its presence felt in other ways, too, organizing volunteer activities through parishes across the Dallas area.

Earlier this week, some of the kids working in the St. Bernard gym picnicked in a park with mentally disabled people. On another day, a few visited a nursing home, painting the fingernails of some residents.

Every day this week, a gardening crew of junior high and high school students showed up at the estate of an elderly widow unable to maintain her three acres of property.

And in Allen, residents of an assisted-living home have been treated to daily visits by a group of junior high school students. On Monday, the kids beat the elders in a spelling bee by a single point. On Tuesday, they listened to Frank Sinatra together.

Laurie Thode, activities director at Mustang Creek Estates, said she was thrilled to have the kids visit.

"This is such a forgotten people," she said. "Some of them never have any visitors."