Friday, May 6th – A Busy Day!

It feels like months have gone by since we arrived here at Baja Mexico when actually its just been a few days. In just these few days we’ve built two little but amazing homes that will impact lives of two families for a lifetime.  Yesterday was day four of construction, the last day of work. All that was left in the houses to do was putting in inner walls, bed frames, a bit of roofing and painting. We split into two crews, the shopping crew and building crew. While the building crew finished up working on last touches and fixes, the shopping crew shopped for furniture, groceries and household items. Shopping was an experience. We first stopped at the furniture place. We needed basic furniture like a table, mattresses, chairs and shelves or dressers. It was an incredible feeling having to pick a dinner table knowing that this family would sit around it for every dinner. Although picking a table that could fit a family of 9  (or more!) was kind of tricky but we managed to find something suitable. After all the mattress “testing” (which was basically us jumping up and down on them to make sure they were good enough) and dresser picking was done we did some bargaining to get them as low as possible. And then we were off to the grocery store. There we picked about a months supply of groceries and necessities for them. It was nice to see and pick what things were going into the house, and more and more the house became a reality. The shopping crew joined the building crew in the afternoon to help put in those final touches. And voila! The houses were all done and they were beautiful. Most of the rest of the afternoon was spent with the family and children. Playing with the kids proved to be as tiring as hammering in nails all day. They wanted to be taken on never ending piggyback rides. And even though we were panting, trying to catch our breaths they wanted go again and again (they seemed to run on an impossible amount of energy). And who could say no to those eager adorable faces? For supper, we were invited by the lady who mortgaged the pieces of land we were building on, to her place. Traditional fish and chicken taco, dinner couldn’t have been better. After the traditional and fun dinner we headed to a house where we would be playing a movie on a big screen projector for the local community. We watched ‘Toy Story 3’ in Spanish. It was sweet to see the kids so excited about the movie. Overall it was a packed day and we were exhausted by the end of it. But all of us had a sense of accomplishment and that was calming. Today we are dedicating the houses to the families and we’re so excited! I have a feeling we won’t ever forget this day, and neither will the families.-From Baja Mexico