Students to Build Habitat Homes in Honduras Over Spring Break

Students to Build Habitat Homes in Honduras Over Spring Break
BY PHILIP MONTGOMERY
Rice News Staff
February 26, 1998

This spring break some Rice students will be digging in sand, but they won’t
be building sand castles on a beach&emdash;they’ll be mixing mortar and
concrete for a cinder-block Habitat for Humanity house in Honduras.

From Feb. 28 through March 8, 11 Rice students and two staff members will spend
their spring break working from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with Habitat for Humanity masons
and carpenters in Seis de Mayo, a poor neighborhood near San Pedro Sula in eastern
Honduras.

The students are members of the Rice Habitat for Humanity Chapter, founded
in 1993. They work in conjunction with Houston Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit
organization that recruits volunteers to help build homes for low-income families.
The annual spring break trip has occurred every year since 1995.

The students raised about $17,000 to cover travel expenses including airfare,
food, housing and transportation while staying in San Pedro Sula.

Lillian Ortiz, a Wiess junior, and Ivonne McLean, a Jones sophomore, are coordinating
the trip. Both were struck by the poverty during their first trip with Rice
Habitat to Honduras last spring.

McLean, who is a native of Colombia, said the poverty is overwhelming, but
she is grateful to be able to help a little bit.

The Honduras experience is more than building a house, she said. It is a great
time to bond with the Habitat family, their neighbors and the other Habitat
workers.

"In the end, because of us, four or five families will have a place to
live," Ortiz said. "It seems pointless to be lying on a beach getting
drunk when you can be helping people. There is such a big need for help down
there."

Many people live in one- or two-room shacks made out of cardboard and loose
lumber, she said.

"We were building a house next to a shack where a single mother with nine
kids lived," Ortiz recalled from last year’s trip. "No running water,
the sewer water runs right out in the street. When we play soccer [with the
neighborhood kids] the ball always ends up in the sewer and we have to take
it out. To see that people live in these conditions, it opens [Rice students’]
eyes."

For more information about the Rice Habitat for Humanity project in Honduras
or to make a contribution to the project, call (713) 666-1527 or send e-mail
to lillian1@rice.edu.