Homes of Hope

This post has been a long time coming. No excuses, just haven’t felt inspired to write anything about it until now. For those of you that don’t know. At the end of July myself and a team of 6 other guys from my church went down to the Dominican Republic to work with YWAM (youth with a mission) to build a home for a family who otherwise would not have been able to have one.

I’m not going to spend much time detailing the back ground of the family we built for or their situation. If you’d like to read more about them check out this blog post from one of the YWAM guys that does a great job laying it out for you from a local perspective. What I am going to talk about is the actual building process (briefly), the travel and accommodations, and short-term missions in general.

Travel/Accommodations

If you ever have the chance to be involved in a trip with YWAM I recommend it. They do a great job with accommodations and the food. We were led to believe that the conditions would be fairly spartan and don’t get me wrong, many of the niceties that we’re used to aren’t available in the DR. However, if the staff was able to provide it for you, chances are they would. The biggest thing that you have to keep in mind (as you would pretty much anywhere outside of the US) is that you don’t want to have the water in your mouth. That means brushing your teeth or even rinsing food to a limited extent. Fortunately, this was not much of an issue as the DR has a water service that delivers bottled water all over the island and the base always had an ample supply.

Our particular travel arrangements had us waking up early coming and going. We left out of Norfolk and flew down to Atlanta to catch our flight in to Santo Domingo, DR at about 5:30am. As usual in ATL, we were delayed but still got in to DR around 3pm EST. Dominican customs and border control are pretty straight forward being a popular tourist destination so we were over that hurdle in short order. From the airport in Santo Domingo it is about a 45 minute van ride east to San Pedro or more accurately, Juan Dolio, where the YWAM compound is located.  Our return flight had us flying out at 3am so you can do the backwards math to get to an 11:30 departure time for the airport from the compound.

The Home

The home we went down there to build is a relatively simple structure. It’s a 20’x20′ square set on a concrete pad

divided into 4 interior rooms with 2 exterior doors and 5 windows. It is wired for electricity with overhead lights and outlets in each room. Upon entering the front door there is a living room on the right half of the structure that is approximately 2/3 of the total depth of the house.The left half is divided evenly between two bedrooms. The rear 1/3 of the right half is a utility room/kitchen area. The home is not plumbed. The exterior is made of a material called “plycem” which is a concrete board with an exterior finish on one side. The roof is a corrugated sheet metal. The interior is drywalled. The ceiling is open to the roof for ventilation. The windows are louvered and the doors are standard metal exterior doors with deadbolts.

 

Our version of this home included an additional room off the front bedroom to an existing concrete pad which was intended to be a bathroom, approximately, 4′ deep and 9′ wide.

We built the house in two and a half days. We like to leave it at that when we tell the story, but the fact of the matter is we wouldn’t have had a chance of doing it in that time without assistance from some dominicans and members of the YWAM team. In particular, we had a foreman named Joe that helped coordinate the different work groups as well as a veteran builder named Mitch who helped start the program and was generally the go-to guy with any building questions. They also sent us several other people depending on the day. The dominicans who helped us were plentiful, but the linchpin pretty much boiled down to one guy, Jose Luis, who could have single-handedly built the house in a day, but was gracious enough to let us slow him down so we could have the experience.

At the outset of the build we split into 3 groups. A framing crew, a trusses crew, and a painting crew. The framing crew is where the actual building of the house really takes place. The trusses crew mainly meant, do the trusses and then pick up the slack for the framing crew. I was on the trusses crew. [Trusses basically are the things that hold up the roof sheeting. Although, frankly, what we built were rafters, not actually trusses. I won’t bore you with the details unless you want to know, then comment and I’ll reply]. Worth noting before I finish talking about the building process is that all the framing and pretty much everything other than the exterior plycem, drywall, and roofing materials was done with nails and by hand. We had power saws and drills, but all the nails were by hand. I didn’t put much thought into hammers prior to the trip, but that is not something to be over-looked. Driving 16d nails with an ill-suited hammer is a waste of energy and time.

I said I would be brief so I think I’ll stop there. If you’d like a follow up post with more nail by nail details of the building processes I’d be happy to write one, but adding it to this post would probably be overkill.

Missions

It’s hard to put the short-term missions experience into words. This was the first trip I had been on since we’ve had kids. When I was in youth group I went on 5 or 6 trips over the years. I say that to say, having a family and doing short-term missions work is a whole different world. When you’re a kid you can pretty much throw yourself into the trip and not even think about anything else. When you have a family you have the natural thoughts of missing them and if you’re not careful it can take away from what God has for you on the trip. Fortunately, Charity does a great job of handling things at home when I’m gone so I don’t have to worry about anything while I’m away, but it is still difficult after a few days to maintain your focus.

That said, I’m of the opinion that everyone should be involved in short-term missions work. The benefit that you are able to give to wherever you’re ministering is straightforward, but the key is what happens to you to connect you back to God or bring you even closer. There’s something about being away from your comfort zones and being pushed to do things and try things that you would otherwise not have the opportunity to do that helps focus you on the Lord. I’m grateful for a church that recognizes this and helps coordinate opportunities to do things like this.

Coming up in Chris’ Corner… I’m going to try to do a fantasy football for women primer to get all the wives out there ready for the upcoming NFL season in case they want to have a chance of talking to their husbands over the next 4 months.