Upstairs in a sunny classroom, the kids toil away at work that could easily seem tedious but in their minds, is something close to rapturous.

Lying in a hospital bed in her home, an artist envisions the canvas that she cannot paint, and gives detailed instructions for its creation, though she cannot speak.

An hour or so a week, every week for months, students at Holy Trinity School in East Honolulu have been painting thousands of tiny squares of paper. They're close to 60,000 squares now. They have cut each square from sheets of paper and carefully colored them according to weekly directions.

It is like a master class, though the master has never been to the classroom and the subject being taught varies from art to math to medicine, even religion.

Miles away in her Nu'uanu home, beloved Hawai'i artist Peggy Chun gets updates on the project from Holy Trinity teacher Shelly Mecum.

"Each one is a little masterpiece to her," Mecum says. Though the finished squares vary wildly from one kid's paintbrush to the next, "there are no mistakes."

The squares will be used like tiles in a mosaic. The finished image will be Father Damien, the Catholic priest who devoted his life to serving the Hansen's disease patients in Kalaupapa. It is a piece Chun has wanted to paint for a long time, since before she was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, a disease that gradually took away her motor functioning.

"She's so appreciative," Mecum tells a kindergartner bent over a square, focused so intently on getting the orange right. "You're helping her make a painting."

Chun was diagnosed in 2002 with the disease that took the lives of her mother, grandfather and twin sister. Now, five years after that diagnosis, she is paralyzed except for her eye movement, unable to breathe on her own and tended to by a cadre of paid caregivers and volunteers around the clock. As the ALS progressed, Chun managed to find ways to keep painting, first switching the brush to her left hand when her right hand became affected, then, when that didn't work anymore, holding the paintbrush in her teeth while a caregiver moved her head. Later, when she couldn't control the muscles in her mouth to hold the brush, she'd paint with watercolors dabbed on the tip of her nose. Chun also learned to paint using a computer program that recognized the movement of her eyes. Now that doesn't work, either. She can't close her eyelids anymore, and her eyes get too dry for the computer to read.

So the kids are doing the painting.

Eighth-grader Joshua Aiu lets a kindergartner sit on his lap while he explains the assignment.

"You put the first color on, and then your brush goes in the water, and then the second color."

The instructions on the whiteboard say, "Wet on wet, base color: cadmium yellow lemon. Drop in color: cadmium red light."

The little boy follows Joshua's instructions, and turns his face up to him for approval. The two have the easy closeness of brothers as they paint the squares, sometimes leaning against each other, sometimes jabbing each other in the ribs or letting an errant flick of the brush get a bit of paint on the other, just for fun.

"We're being her hands, helping her reach her dream," Joshua says. kindergartner Julian Lagarde, his little apprentice, has managed to sneak some yellow paint onto his cheek. "It should be everyone's duty to help others reach their dreams."

Chun's familiar watercolor prints of old plantation houses, mangoes and whimsical cows hang in the classroom. A CD of music composed for her by Daniel Ho plays while the children work. The ones who have met her — members of the school choir went to sing for her at her house — tell stories about her.

"She let us fish in the stream in her yard," seventh-grader Ali Calhoun says. "She's so awesome."

"At first, I thought, why isn't she smiling? Isn't she happy to see us?" Ali says. Chun can't smile anymore. "But then I looked in her eyes, and she was smiling inside."

To communicate now, Chun uses a spellboard. She looks at a letter while someone holds the board in front of her. It's almost a guessing game to decipher what she means. "Is it K? Is it L? It's L."

A second person writes down each letter, and everyone in the room helps figure out the sentence. It's grueling work for Chun, but her trademark humor shines through.

"She spelled out, 'Do my laugh,' " Ali recalls, "and then one of her caregivers did the exact impersonation of what her laugh sounded like. 'Ha ha ha ha!' It was so amazing."

Mecum and Chun worked together on a children's book that will be released by Mutual Publishing this fall. Mecum, who authored the popular "God's Photo Album," wrote the text to go along with Chun's paintings, which tell the story of her life through the eyes of her cat. The creative partnership and friendship is what brought the Damien mosaic project to Mecum's class at Holy Trinity. Over the months, all 106 students in the school have painted the little pieces. Mecum takes the finished pieces to Chun's bedside and brings her spellboard instructions back to the kids.

There isn't any sort of external deadline for the finished portrait of Damien. It will be finished when it's finished, and will be displayed where it is called. Like Damien himself, it will represent compassion, endurance and unbending faith. Over the next several months, Chun's friends and caregivers will help to assemble the tiny squares into the mosaic, following a detailed numbered grid that Chun has planned. She will spell out the instructions, letter by letter, and the thousands of pieces will be glued, one by one.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.