Hi all. My name’s Lou, and I spent the past several days down in Tijuana helping the eco-politan team build the house. The entire experience was awesome. Some of us returned last night to get back to our normal lives (work…) but I think I speak for everyone when I say that we wish we could have remained down there the full week, as some of our party did. When we wrapped up construction on Monday afternoon, we had finished framing the exterior walls, infilling with palettes, and began framing the interior walls. We’d also started on the outhouse. I’ve got some photos, which I’ll post here soon.
There’s a lot I could say about what I learned just by being in a country and an environment so different than what we’re used to here in the States… there’s still a lot of northern influence because TJ is a border city– you can still listen to STAR and Ryan Seacrest on the radio–but there’s a lot of people who live in a level of poverty we’re not usually exposed to. The neighborhood we’re building in consists of a vast collection of handmade shacks alongside dirt roads on the side of a hill. There’s no plumbing and electricity comes by illegally tapping into the grid. The variety of families and styles of living vary greatly from one house to another, though. Up the hill from our site, there’s a woman who’s six months pregnant and she doesn’t even have a roof over her head. But our neighbor, a couple of houses down, seems to have put together a decent home despite a meager income. It’s very small, but they’ve got tile floors, a porch, a kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom, even a front and back yard. Still no running water, but they have television and cell phones. The family who lived there invited us over for dinner twice, and it gave us a sense of how people live in TJ. Not too much farther down the hill, where some of the roads become paved, there are buildings formed from concrete and guarded with iron gates.
I’m going to let some of the other people do some of the talking and sharing about their own experiences. But first, I’ll introduce you to the rest of the team:
