Wednesday, August 17, 2011


For a group of employees from U.S. Consulate General Tijuana, Saturday, March 5 was not a day of relaxation but rather a day spent in hard work for a good cause. Fifteen American officers and locally employed staff spent the day helping to build a home for a needy family. Along with students from the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, the group mixed concrete, transported it by hand, and poured it to create a new floor for what will soon be a brand-new house in the El Niño neighborhood east of Tijuana. For some of the Consulate volunteers, it was their first time visiting the resource-poor neighborhoods to the east of the city and their first time working in hands-on construction. Vice-Consul John Callan organized the event in collaboration with Esperanza International, a Tijuana non-profit organization dedicated to building homes for low-income families. Families who participate in the Esperanza program must own their land, must bewilling to make a small payment each month, and, most importantly, must be willing to assist in the construction of other program participants’ houses. Over the past ten years, Esperanza has helped to construct over five hundred homes in the Tijuana area, but this one was special. The family in question has a teenage son who has been diagnosed with a brain tumor, and his doctors have said that if he is not provided with a suitable home, his quality of life will be severely diminished. For this reason, Consulate volunteers and university students shoveled sand and gravel, scooped concrete, and hauled it up the hill in plastic buckets to the construction site. “It certainly was a change from our usual office work. I’m sore in a lot of new places,” said one volunteer. “But many of us joined the State Department because we wanted to be of service to others, and projects like this give us the opportunity to serve the people of Tijuana.”