The Building Process ...

Now that we are back in Canada we can post pictures to show the building process.

These are pictures of Francesca's home from March of 2014. 

This is Francesca.  Her house was the first home the team built. 

The community has set up a committee to decide on who has the greatest need for homes.

Local community members removed the old house prior to us arriving. Here they are doing the final levelling of the site for the new house.









We arrive at 7 am and wake up the kids. Teenage girls are teenage girls everywhere. She wasn't too happy having her picture taken quite yet. 

This also shows the reality of the situation.  The family has been without a home for a number of days and this is where they sleep and eat, outside.




Part of our work was pouring concrete for the floors and front entrance.

One of the ladies to the left is carrying a 5 gallon pail full of rocks.  This is how these ladies carried the rock and sand to the work site which was needed to make the concrete!

They carried the containers in this way a couple of hundreds yards down a small ravine from the closet road where it was dumped. Yikes!
The first steps to building the homes are to lay out the foundation. We have to dig 19 holes to accommodate the posts you see at the bottom of the walls. Marv had a tarp set up that located the holes for us.  This allowed the home owner to see where the house would be positioned and to make adjustments where necessary.

We had a lot of help digging which was good because the ground was pretty hard in places.

The next steps are putting the two end walls together, sheeting them up and installing flashing around the doors and windows. From here they are stood up into place.

While the walls are being put together, Jake has gathered himself a crew to sheet in the end trusses. The trusses are then put on the walls. The interior walls are also installed prior to the trusses being set up. The end walls are sheeted up and the building is then squared and straightened up.

Elias, who works for Cecilia at the mission, was our roof guy. Us Canadians were a little bit too large for this job and not near as agile.

The roof consist of a number of cross members attached to the trusses and then the roof sheeting is screwed down. The sheet metal is cut to size at the local manufacturer.

Darren and Andrew are inside working on installing windows, doors and trim.


LEFT: Andre and Lisa straighten the supports for the front porch to set in concrete. Not sure what has their attention in the wheelbarrow, but it was a long hot day.  Maybe they are hoping it will fill itself up! RIGHT: A local kid is helping Marv and I line up the walls.

Mixing concrete was a pretty demanding job at the end of the day with temperatures over 30 degrees Celsius. Thankfully we had a lot of help with this part.  The men, women and kids all pitched in to do the final floor grading and hauling the concrete in to the house to be levelled and finished.






Despite the extreme heat and hard work, we had a wonderful experience and a lot of fun working in El Salvador. The language barriers didn't prevent us from building new relationships with the people in the villages. God put a lot of things in place to make it possible for us to come here to serve and hopefully leave a lasting impact on this community. We can't help feeling full of joy as we were truly blessed, having spent time working along side, laughing and sharing God's love with our new friends from Tutultepeque, El Salvador.

BACK (left to right) - Tim, Darren, Jake, Andre
FRONT - Marv, Lisa, Andrew
Special thanks to John and Naomi for translating for us and keeping us well fed.

Finished Project

Stay tuned for the next posts on our activities with the children's ministry at El-Roi Missions