On April 24, seventeen people from Simi Valley loaded into vehicles and headed south. Their mission: Help a mother in Mexico build a new life for her family.
(CLAIR | Simi Valley, CA) – They drove to a dirt lot in Ensenada, Mexico, owned by a single mother named Elizabeth and her thirteen-year-old son Francisco. Elizabeth makes about two hundred dollars a week. A hundred and seventy-seven of those dollars, every month, is what it costs her to own that lot.
The trip was organized by Simi Community Church, and most of the seventeen volunteers came from the congregation. It was the church's sixth building trip in ten years. The church partners with Youth With A Mission — known as YWAM — and specifically with the organization's Homes of Hope program, which has built more than eight thousand homes across twenty-seven nations since 1990. YWAM's San Diego/Baja chapter alone runs roughly six builds every week.
The model is straightforward. YWAM brings the materials, the tools, a translator, and four to five staff who run construction. The volunteer team brings the labor.
"We just provide the manpower," said Tamara Lott, the church's missions coordinator and the woman who organized the trip. "We start with a foundation on Saturday morning, and we leave with a home that has windows and a door they can lock, a roof, three rooms, a bed and kitchen supplies."
A Door That Locks
The house is small by American standards — a 320-square-foot wood structure on a concrete slab, wired for electricity, divided into three rooms. But the upgrade for the family receiving it is enormous, and the slab itself does most of the work.
George Grap, a returning team member who has been on multiple builds, explained it before the team left.
"There's a concrete slab that we build on. And what it does is it kind of keeps them off the ground. And I think seventy-five percent of the cold is reduced because they're off the dirt."
But the math is the hard part. "Elizabeth's two hundred dollars a week against her one hundred seventy-seven dollar mortgage leaves very little for a single mom to save up and build with," George said.
YWAM vets the families before a build team is assigned. The family must already own the lot — that's a hard requirement. Then the organization confirms the family is working, will care for the home, and won't sell it or abandon it. Approved families get added to a build queue that, given the chapter's pace of six houses a week, has produced more than three thousand homes in Mexico to date.
Ten Years, Six Trips, One Pattern
Simi Community Church has been running this trip every other year for a decade. The congregation, founded in 1959 by a group who took out second mortgages on their homes to finance the church building, is now sending its members across the border to build homes for other people.
The trip is unambiguously Christian in its motivation, though conversion is not a requirement of the program. George noted before leaving that he didn't think that Elizabeth and Francisco shared the group's religious faith. However, during the build, it became apparent that they held similar Christian beliefs.
The House That Wasn't There
The build follows a tight choreography. Saturday morning, the team arrives to a poured concrete slab — the most important single element of the whole structure. Once it's set, framing begins. By the end of Saturday, the walls are up, the roof is framed, and what was a bare lot in the morning is an solid structure by sundown.
Sunday is finish work. The work gets sheathed, furniture is assembled, sheetrock is placed, all painting is completed. In this particular home, solar panels were installed to provide electricity, as Elizabeth lives on the side of a hill where there are no power lines.
Then the keys are handed over.
Pastor Tony recalled a previous build from two years ago. There were tears of joy as the family receiving the house saw what had been given. "The blessing on their faces to see not just the house, but the other things - the stove, the tables and the chairs."
He predicted the same for this trip. There will be tears.
What a Weekend Can Be
The team is back in Simi Valley now. Elizabeth and Francisco are in a house that, as recently as April 24th, did not exist.
The numbers tell a clean version of the story. Seventeen people. Forty-eight hours. One family that will never sleep on the ground again.
The longer version is harder to put into a headline. A 67-year-old church founded by people who mortgaged their own homes to build a sanctuary, spending a weekend on a dirt lot in Ensenada, Mexico, so a single mother and her thirteen-year-old son can have a safe place to live.
Truly an unforgettable weekend.
