A 64 year old women stands in the street talking to a man; she is very small but there is strength in her that cannot be denied. They don’t speak the same language yet he knows what she wants from him.
She lives across the street in a house made of sticks, covered with plastic, old wood, and rusty sheet metal. There are no doors to separate the outside from the inside. The house has no windows yet the light finds its way inside to her reality; a place she shares with her family.
Homes from the Heart, with the University of Cincinnati and the University of California Los Angeles, just wrapped up a building initiative unlike anything we’ve done before. We had over 60 volunteers on teams in El Salvador, Haiti, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Stay tuned for stories from our student volunteers!
“I have been on similar service trips before, but I had never seen a team come together and accomplish so much work in such a short time. Everyone on my trip got along so well and it really showed on the worksite. We were able to complete the walls in a four-room house in less than seven hours. We were told that our team set the record for doing so. We felt really proud of ourselves after that day.”
This area, along a lake called Etang Saumatre, is home to over 25,000 people. Most of them live in mud and thatch roof houses which are not permanent. We were starting the project in the community to build safe and permanent homes for the families, some who moved from the city after the earthquake.
Homes from the Heart cofounder Bob Miller died recently at his home in Kansas City, Missouri. Bob was a giant among generous people. His priorities in order were God, family, work. His legacy lives on through the thousands of people his generosity has benefited. Bob was a strong backer of building homes for those struck by disaster, first in El Salvador following the 2001 earthquake, and more recently in Haiti.
July 1st marked the arrival of a new group called Global Sustainability Project. All linked as UCLA alum, the group brought with them ideas and projects to work on development in our community in San Luis Talpa. The week was much different than our usual teams, since for the most part the group planned it out themselves.
The love and patience showed by everyone there was a yet another reminder of how important it is for us to care for the least of these, who are so often forgotten. We know the love shown to those kids and the rare chance for them to spend a day away from the orphanage was a blessing from God and we can’t thank Him enough for such an opportunity.
Referred to as the “Cincinatti Teacher’s Group”, a hodge-podge of mostly University of Cincinnati alumni, met up for a week in El Salvador filled with both hard work and fun. Joining them was a team from Vineville Baptist Church, ranging in age from 14-76. Each group brought different experiences, strengths, and talents that made for a fun-filled week for all.
A group of 10 UC students from the Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity made their way down to El Salvador June 11th-19th for a week of working with concrete, concrete…and more concrete. Quickly settling into the jobs of shoveling, lifting buckets, and transferring concrete into the molds, the group put in a hard day’s work pouring walls. Every member of the team was willing to serve and help anywhere they were needed, and their ability to do some of the harder tasks was a huge factor in getting the work done.
The team found out about the Fuller Center’s building projects in El Salvador through one of their coaches. Lance Durbin, who coaches wide receivers for the championship team has been working with Highlands students for several years as a volunteer with the local Younglife program as well as the football program. Lance began coming to El Salvador with Serve Beyond Cincinnati, a group from the University of Cincinnati, in December 2007. He later led other groups down to work with the Fuller Center and recently spent 2.5 months volunteering in El Salvador. Lance says he is proud that several of the things he is most passionate about in life have come together through this project which will ultimately come together as shelter for a deserving family in El Salvador.
Students from the University of Cincinnati once again visited El Salvador for an Alternative Spring Break. Between March 20 – 27, ten students chose to spend their break from school building homes and getting dirty while having many adventures along the way. The students were representatives of the UC service group Serve Beyond Cincinnati which has been sending groups to El Salvador through the Fuller Center since December 2007.
Positive feedback from their experience has not stopped. Even after a difficult week, Carson Shook, who will graduate this year from East Lyme High School in Connecticut, found that after returning home “there are some things that make you realize how great life is, and how little you need to be happy, and what people truly care about you…I miss El Salvador.”Many of the participants on the trip were experiencing a foreign world for the first time. In El Salvador it is easy to find people generally living happy lives despite the fact many of the structures people call homes would not be suitable for a tool shed in the United States.
In the quest for relief Zuze Bonderer made several appeals for trees from local government agencies. Fuller Center staff have had a long term relationship with Consejo Nacionál, a Salvadoran Federal agency that deals with adolescent needs throughout the country. Carman Cordoba, a Director of Consejo Nacionál, directed us to the Alcaldias (City Hall) of San Salvador and Soyapango, the capitol and the second largest city in El Salvador. We wrote letters describing our organization and the need for trees in our projects. After running through the procedures we had success when the Alcaldia of Soyapango donated about 65 trees and small shrubs and San Salvador donated 75.
The real story is in the metal rebar. It is apparently the most valuable commodity in Soleil. I kept wanting the crew to help us get to the key structural points that needed to be cut out. They on the other hand wanted to secure the bundles of metal rebar we cut out.
These bundles or floor nerves are about a foot wide and 4 inches thick. They are made of a mass of rebar bound together. It gives the floor or ceiling it’s strengh. When we cut these out, there is a frenzy of activity. Everyone wants the bar. It is like we are mining for gold. Occasionaly, a length of rod would fall off the top of our building. Other people from the area would rush in to grab the rod and our crew would start screaming and running to stop them.
Haitian gang members negotiate different than most of us do. They yell at each other. Then they talk fast at you. Then, I pick up my toys (I mean tools) and act like I am going home. Everyone calms down, I tell them how proud of them I am, then we hit fist and slap our chest in some gang symbol and we are all ok.
I was told today, they thought I was going to hook up a tractor and yank the second floor off the first. It does not work like that. You have to bust it up and push off the debris. You do this while not damaging the first floor or killing someone.
Mike my partner in helping people yelled at me today, “Rob you can’t go upstairs and out work the help. They will watch you work while they get paid.” So, I guess I will try to stay cleaner tomorrow. There is just so much to do here I feel everyone needs to be working harder than usual.
The group of HFTH and Fuller Center volunteers have been sleeping in tents and living on pasta for nearly a week now. Within the first few days in Haiti the group had many difficult experiences. The team drove at least one truckload of critically injured people to the airport in hopes of getting the U.S. military to care for them. They have witnessed first hand the need for over 400,000 permanent homes to be built around Port-au-Prince. Thousands of Haitians walk the streets with no where to go as the backlog of aid waiting to enter the country grows. They have begun working with Fr. Ricks on the first of 18 heavily damaged street schools that used to provide educations to over 6000 kids.
On January 22 we finished the third day of work on the first Greater Blessings project in Chiltiupan. Generally the Fuller Center is in the business of building new homes but the Greater Blessings program allows families with existing homes to receive basic repairs or improvements. Sister Rose identified a family who had the title to a piece of land with a large “bajareque” home (one constructed from poles held together with a clay/straw mortar) and an uneven dirt floor. She asked us to pour a new concrete floor.
In a special envoy recently approved by the US State Department, HFTH director Michael Bonderer will be departing Wednesday evening, January 20, from Miami, Florida with hopes of landing in Port-au-Prince. Although there is an extreme level of uncertainty, the team is planning to deliver aid supplies and will be working to establish a base camp of rebuilding efforts in Haiti. Please begin praying for the travelers in this and every envoy of aid workers to Haiti.
Actor Sean Penn has chartered a military cargo plane which will be packed with doctors, medical supplies, food rations, and ceramic water filters. Michael Bonderer will be joined by Rob Beckham, a long time volunteer with Habitat for Humanity and the Fuller Center for Housing. Rob has led volunteers on service trips around the world and traveled extensively in countries with difficult conditions. HFTH friend Ruben Durand will be providing translation services for the group as well as many years of disaster response experience.
This privately operated clinic sits in Santa Clara, the community cooperative next to the Fuller Center’s 60-home housing project, just around the corner from Villa Linda and Millard Fuller. The clinic is staffed by a nurse every day but a doctor is present only three days each week. For the past year several volunteer teams have brought medical supplies and other donations to the clinic to keep it operating and to make sure the clinic can provide a decent level of service to the local residents.
Around 5pm local time on 12 January 2010, the already impoverished island of Haiti was devastated by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake. Please read this article from CNN to learn more. Stay up to date with efforts with USAID.
You can help immediately by donating to the Red Cross to assist the relief effort. Contribute online to the Red Cross, or donate $10 to be charged to your cell phone bill by texting “HAITI” to “90999.” Find more ways to help through the Center for International Disaster Information.
Homes from the Heart builds faith-based communities with support from donors in Kansas City. Thank you!
A Memoir by Board Member, Bambi Shen.
