Mexico Service Project

This is the whole group.  You can see Rob and I are in the center, kneeling.

This is the orphanage--with Kent Lloyd, Jeffrey Bennett, Jeff Morris and Nate Hill (all boys from our ward)

Here are a few kids from the orphanage.  The amazing story is the woman (Cathy).  She was raised in this orphanage--since it opened when she was 4 years old.  Now she is an attorney and works as such mornings and works--and still lives--at the orphanage the rest of the time.

Here's the first wall being raised in the home addition.  This was in the Miramar neighborhood of Tijuana.

Here is a big part of the neighborhood of Miramar.  Amazingly, this was Rachel's friend Greg Hyatt's first area on his mission.  He's in the Tijuana Mission, which is the upper half of Baja California (Mexico).  We met some missionaries who knew him.

Rob and I (and a big group of people from our neighborhood) went to Tijuana, Mexico in mid-July and participated in a service project through "Charity Anywhere."  We worked on 4 projects:  Building a 3-room addition onto an existing home, building an outside-the-home bathroom for a family who up til now had been using a 5 gallon bucket, building a bathroom in an orphanage, and helping build pieces of a developmental center for handicapped children.  Don't let the "three-room-addition" make you think about a 3-room addition here.  The entire addition was about 10 x 12 feet.  The original house is teeny tiny and in terrible disrepair.  Another group that is going down in October will finish our addition as well as gutting the original house inside and re-doing it.  Two of the projects were for members of the LDS church, one was for a Catholic priest parish, and the final project, of course, was the orphanage.  I got to know Tijuana a bit and had a good time being an errand runner.  Rob had a lot of faith in my abilities, which made me happy and proud.  It was an amazing experience, and one that made me oh so grateful for the blessings I have.