Home Improvement

In the summer of 2004, my second trip to Honduras, the group Marc and I led was able to build 30 houses. There was some where around 83 people that came that year. As every summer is, it was an awesome summer. On the very last day we built two houses in the Valley of Angels. The houses were side by side and one was called the old guy house. The builders included Don White, Wally Swedenburg, Larry Allen. To name a few. Maybe Rick Willis. I don't remember. Of course, those guys finished first. The team leader on the other house was Nicole. Marc let her be crew leader because she raised enough money to buy a house over and above the cost of her trip. Some of the members on that team were Sara Bennett, Pearley Freeman, Earl and Beverly. I was there. I am getting too old to remember who worked on that house.

The bus could not get to these sites and some of us rode the lumber truck up to the house sites. It was a busy day. In addition to two houses, there was a food distribution. Marc brought those people distributing food up in a pickup truck.

When the guys finished, they came over to help us finish. We always say a prayer in every house after we finish building. After we prayed with the families, Marc began to shuttle every one down to the bus. The lumber truck had long gone and that was the only way to get all of us back to the bus.

As Marc took as many people as he could cram in the pickup, it began to rain. The rest of us waited inside Nicole's house. As we waited, it began to rain harder and harder. A real downpour. We stood in that house we had just finished and watched water rush in one side, through the house, and out the other side. I remember the man was still happy he had a house. He said he would dig a trench and divert some of the water. He was under no illusion he could divert it all. I was crying, thinking if he had had any of his stuff in the house, it would have been soaked. Pearley went outside in the pouring rain and tried to fill in the gaps so the water would not rush through. We were all stunned. That incident forever changed how we build houses. By the next summer we had figured out how to put a wooden floor in a house so the water rushes under the house, not through it. Perhaps there was a reason we caught in a rainstorm on a mountain inside a house we had just finished building.

I will never forget that house and that experience as long as I live.

Friday, Marc took our friends sightseeing. They went to the typical places: Santa Lucia, shopping in the Valley of Angels, etc. Marc then drove them up that mountain and on the ridge simply because the views are so breath-taking.

It gives me great pleasure to report that the man has spent the last six years improving his home. It is no longer a wooden Torch house, but adobe. The people who try to improve their homes have to do so gradually. They do not have the resources to do so all at once. He bought or made a few adobe blocks at a time, as his finances allowed. When he had enough blocks, he would start laying them. He would save and buy a few more blocks at a time and continue this process until the house was complete. He has not only improved his house, but enlarged it as well. You can see the dark line right past the door where the adobe is a slightly different color, that is where the original wooden house was and he has added the rest of it.

While that house changed the way we build houses, and changed me as well, I am so happy that we built it for someone that just needed a little help getting started and was able to improve and expand it.

Terri