Day 2 - Standing the Walls!

Tuesday (Day 2) is by far the hardest day physically for Casas teams.  This is the day that the walls go up and are blackboarded, drilled for electrical lines and insulated and chicken wire is put up.  The roof sections are assembled and put up with sheeting, tar paper and shingles (and insulation as long as your site doesn't get an unexpected rain shower) and the windows and door are put on. It's a long, hot, hard day but it is so satisfying because you can SEE huge progress by the end of the day.  You arrive at daylight and there is just a concrete slab and by the time you end the day, there is an actual house there!  It's such a cool day (one of my favorites) and it's the day that even though the students are dead tired and barely staying awake through evening worship, they are so excited to see how much they were able to do and how far they could go in a day!

Tech raising and securing their walls

Jacob working on the walls

Working on the roof sections

Blackboarding their walls

Working on the roof

Shingling

Emma holding the baby on their site

FSU Team 1 raising their walls

Cassie holding up the wall all by herself!

Getting the blackboard up

Watching the storm come in

Katie holding the baby

Getting ready to raise the roof

CMU getting ready to raise the walls

Josh entertaining Kevin and his sister

Look at that!  It's a house!

Working on the insulation

Morgan and Kevin

Kevin helping paint the trim

Working the electrical around the insulation

Danielle and Melissa working on the roof while Tyler supervises

Ty cutting the last boards

Standing up the walls in the rain

Hauling over the roof section

The guys on FSU Team 2 getting ready to push the section up

Mark getting everything square

Chris and Tyler working on chicken wire

Day 1 - Concrete and Framing

Day 1 (Monday) is one of the harder days because not only are new students being introduced to all of the chaos and poverty that surrounds them, but it's also a lot of prep work. They want to be pouring more into their family, to be working as hard as they can, but there are all of the little, detail oriented steps that need to be done.  Steps like measuring and cutting all of the 8 and 12 ft boards (and keeping track of the 7' 7 7/8" cuts!), inventorying the tools, setting up the work site flow, leveling and creating the base for the concrete slab, smoothing out the slab and waiting for the concrete to dry.  It's a lot of stop and go on the first day and it can be difficult for students to feel at all encouraged that they're really doing something in Juarez that day.

But, much like a lot of other situations in life, all of the hours of prep work pays off and at the end of the day, there is some evidence of progress as you can see in the photos below!

CMU preparing their slab base

Taylor, Cameron, Glen and Ross on Team Baleigh's site

CMU getting the boards ready for cutting

Ross and Travis building a U-Joint

Zeke preparing the slab base

Adam making sure the base is level and ready for concrete

Mitch supervising his crew

Bruce and Ross screeting the slab

FSU Team 1 at their site when they first arrived

Michigan Tech building block towers with the kids

Kayla playing soccer with the kids

Michigan Tech's site with the walls framed in.

FSU Team 2 spreading concrete

Panoramic view of the MTU site

Back in the States!!!

We are officially back in the states!!!

There are four families in Juarez who received brand new houses yesterday.  Every part of those houses was built by the staff and students of His House and their sweat, bashed fingers and sometimes even tears.  It's been three intense days of hard work, lots of dust, sand and even some rain (yes, it rained on us 3 times in the desert!), but it was all completely worth it!  We're glad to be in the states again, but we miss Mexico already.

We're working in El Paso for the day, helping Casas por Cristo with projects around their stateside office - there's a few CMU students printing T-shirts, MTU and FSU guys are running a wood chipper and other students from all three campuses are working on packing all of the tool/supply crates for houses in Juarez for the next few months.  Tonight, we'll go celebrate with dinner with us and our Casas team leaders and then tomorrow morning, we'll be on our way back to the frozen tundra of Michigan.  I think there are a few of us who are even looking forward to the van rides home because at least it means that we can sit. (Three days of building houses and being on our feet constantly make even those van seats semi-comfortable.  At least the company around you makes it entertaining as they hog your space!)

Watch the blog today for pictures from the week!  We only have 2,200 of them to choose from (you should have seen the pile of cell phones and memory cards I was handed last night!), but I won't bombard you with that many.  We do have some great ones though that I'm excited to share with you today.

Have a great day and keep checking in!