...making a house a home...

This past weekend I went with 40ish others from the LA area (mostly from Pacific Crossroads Church--my church) to Tijuana, Mexico to build a few houses.

Yes I did say a few.

This was through Youth With A Mission (YWAM) and Homes for Hope. They team together to build homes for the poor in Mexico/Baja area and have built more than 2400 homes in the past 15 years.

It was a lot of work over 1.5 days with three teams led by two head builders, a bunch of tools and lots of love and teachable spirits.

The houses weren't huge and by no means swank. However, we arrived with three pads of concrete about 14 ft by 14 ft and we build four walls, sheetrocked, trimmed and painted everything, put a roof on, wired for electricity and even stuffed it with new furniture and our donated shoes, toys, shirts, soccer balls, etc.

This family of 6 kids and two parents was previously in a house walled in with scrap board, a garage door, lots of plywood and some plastic tarps. Needless to say, they were very much in need of help.

Below are a few pics with captions. For a much more extensive documentation visit my friend's flickr page! HERE

The very beginning

The cheesy politician


Yes, those are baseball socks.

95% complete...gives you a scale of what we did

Why we do it