5 people, 1 house, 3 1/2 days

This week brought a group of 5 people from Hanover College in Indiana over their winter break to YLM to build a house for one of the caretakers at Cristo Rey in Juarez. They had set a goal to finish the house by Thursday so they could do some outreach here in El Paso on Friday. Well, they not only met their goal, but beat it by a half day, so we spent a little bit of time at the market in Juarez on Thursday afternoon doing some bargain hunting. Some of you may remember Jason, who was a volunteer with us over the summer. He was the force behind bringing the group from his school, and it was great to see him again and be able to work with his group. They were a blast to work with, and very driven to succeed. I am pretty confident that no group this small has ever put a house up that fast. Great work.

In other work, this week I was able to put the finishing touches on another grant for repairing more homes in sparks, and Erin and I, with a little advice and ideas from Krysia and Stephen, created a gift application on facebook called YLM gifts. It gives everyone the opportunity to connect with their facebook friends by sending them little "gifts" from YLM. They include a Mariachi San Pablo CD, Rita's Gorditas, a paleta, a green light entering Mexico, and even snow in Anapra from when it snowed one day when we were there for a medical clinic.

Also, if you are a ready who wants to know about Enrique, I have some information that I don't think should be shared over blog or email, so please contact me by phone so I can fill you in. If you need my phone number, or really want it emailed to you, please let me know by email.

Enjoy the pictures below, and have a fantastic week. Oh, and it has been about 80 degrees here all week. Absolutely perfect. :)

The group from Hanover getting the siding on the first wall.

Measure twice, and cut once.

Dawn, with 2 of the kids in the family, Cristal and her nephew Alexi

Lauren and Dawn are the new charlie's angels?

The Hanover group with some of the family after the first day of construction.

Lauren and Dawn, the best electricians.

Hanging the drywall.

Cristal wanted to help with the construction of her house, so she jumped in wherever she could.

Roof plywood is on and ready to be finished.

Hanging the ceiling drywall. They were so good that they didn't even need to mark the rafters on the drywall for the screws.

This was the only time that they missed on the first try. (except of course I missed even worse after I gave her a hard time about it. Karma!)

They got after the drywall for sure.

Roof is done, just need to tack in the sides.

Sanding the drywall creates a lot of dust.

Cristal and Dawn with the bilingual new testament that Dawn gave her as a gift.

The house was done by lunch on Thursday. 3 1/2 days. Very nice.

After lunch they passed out some bracelets to the kids from the neighborhood that were around and told them what each color signifies. They even left a few for them to give to their friends at school.

The group with the family that they built for. New friends forever.

The group and me-The Super Six!!!

Let's try this again

Hello everyone,

Welcome to my new blog site. Hopefully this works a little better for me. Please bear with me while I figure out this site. It has been steady with groups over the last few weeks, and I am still finding a little bit of time to get some office work done. To see some things that happened with the past groups prior to this week, please look at Erin's blog. www.missionarymac.blogspot.com

I apologize for not having posting one in a while, but I will try and get better. I have asked Erin to remind me and kind of put some pressure on me to be better. I will start out with a quick recap of this past week. Make sure to look at Erin's blog because she has some wonderful pictures of me on there. NOT!!!!!

This week, we had a quick trip over to Sparks for 3 days of work on a project over there. We basically rebuilt an entire trailer there in 3 days. We did a new roof, new bathroom, 2 different types of tile floor and a new bathroom. Below are some photos of the week, I hope you enjoy them, and that you like the new blog site. I will try and write more later, but I need to go prepare for the groups arriving today. God's blessings on your week.

Old bathroom floor is above. Had to pull out the entire floor and replace it because it was so rotted out.

New tile on bathroom floor.

Old toilet and floor

New toilet-It worked on the first try. :)

Old bathtub and shower

drywall in the back bedroom before painting

Painting the back room

New tile in back room

almost finished with tile in back room

old roof

Put an over roof on

New roof plywood is down

new roof is finished

Erin relaxing in new tub. She had to make a lot of trips to Lowe's because the old parts, and even some of the new didn't fit right. Thanks Erin. :)

New tub and shower, ready to go