Seventeen high school students from southeast B.C. who had been stranded for days in Haiti returned home late Tuesday, grateful to be with their families but still thinking about what they had left behind.

"I now know what it's like and I now know what the world at it's worst is like, and I can't sit at home in Canada and let that happen," said Blake Ouellet, one member of the Mount Sentinel Secondary group from South Slocan.

Classmate Brooklyn Malakoff said coming home was bittersweet.

"I wanted to come home the whole week that I was there but as much as I wanted to come home I wanted to stay there and help them," she said.

The students and their chaperones had arrived in Haiti last week to work on a series of projects, including constructing a well and working on a goat farm.

About 45 minutes after their arrival in the Caribbean nation, a devastating earthquake struck.

For days, parents and school district officials pleaded with government officials to help evacuate the group.

One of the group leaders, Pastor Jim Reimer, was only able to send sporadic emails to anxious families back home. He described how the students were sleeping outdoors; how they had pitched in to raise money to buy rice for local families; how they helped clear debris from a road; how they were experiencing aftershocks every 90 minutes or so.

The students were finally rescued over the weekend and flew to Montreal early Monday morning.

From there, they flew to Calgary, and then they hopped on a bus for the final leg of their journey.

The students have pledged to continue to work to help the people they met in Haiti.

Teacher Don Warthe said the students have clearly learned some valuable lessons.

"You would never ever in a million years set up that type of learning opportunity, but because the opportunity presented itself the learning was beyond measure," he said.

A Facebook page dedicated to the student group was filled with welcome-home messages Tuesday night.

"You guys left kids," one message read, "and came back adults."

With a report from CTV British Columbia's David Kincaid