Friends on Roatan Island.

This is the house as it looked on the day we arrived. The morning rain had soaked the earth and our sneakers sank into the ground as we climbed up the hill to where Nora lives.

Her 3 year-old daughter, Balerie, met us at the “door”.

The first thing I saw was a table and on it, a pot of beans, soaking. Behind me, a refrigerator positioned upon a couple of 2x4s for stabilization, three beds and a sheet hanging in the place of an interior wall.

Vince and Wynn were able to articulate the task before us and got to work whispering to themselves, measuring, creating a mental diagram and making a list of the supplies needed. “I thought I had a big enough imagination,” Jill said to me once we climbed back down the hill and were standing on solid ground. “But apparently not big enough.” It was truly impossible to hold back tears. We were all pretty silent, humbled by the state of poverty and overwhelmed at the daunting task before us. Then Jill said, “If they could get a refrigerator up there, I feel like we can do anything!”

Balerie helps out.

While the floor beams of the house were being reinforced from underneath, the rest of the team built a staircase out of old and abandoned tires from a nearby junkyard. We bought gravel and poured it into the middle of each tire. Next we sawed metal rebars into spikes which were then hammered into the gravel to keep the tires in place during rainy season.

The hill was filled with sounds of the rooster crowing, electric saws cutting, mallets clanking and nails banged into wood. And sometimes an occasional silence.

Building the tire staircase.

Building the tire staircase.

Mounting the Siding 14 year-old Jesse came running up to me. “You have to see this!” he screamed, out of breath and elated. “We put siding on two sides! It’s starting to look like a house now!”

While some of us helped to secure the siding for each side of the house, the rest of us started taking down the old wood scraps from the other sides.

Painting the House

While I kicked around a ball with the neighborhood boys, Jill and Marissa asked Nora what color she wanted us to paint her house. “Anything you decide,” she told Marissa in Spanish. Jill persisted, asking Nora for her favorite color. Finally, she pointed to Marissa’s shirt: light blue. So we set out to paint Nora’s house.

Painting the House

Painting the House

The Floor

Jesse put down the coconut he managed to cut open with a machete he borrowed and we began to paint the boards which would later be laid down as the new floor.

The Floor Before.

The Floor After.

Making the Window Shutters

Marissa learned to use the screw gun and got to work building the shutters with Vince, as little Balerie watched from the corner.

Originally, we were going to use boards to protect the house from hurricane season but decided to go the extra mile and create true shutters out of leftover 2x4s and siding. “It’s easier than fixing up the window frame, so why not?” Vince said. Kathy wanted to paint them bright yellow, but we were running out of time, so we used the leftover beige floor paint. “The color will look more like butter once it hits the light,” Kathy said. “It’ll be beautiful.”

Electricity

Instead of borrowing electricity from a neighbor's house and running an extension cord across the hill, Wynn installed a junction box and light switch so that Nora could illuminate the inside of her house at night.

The Front Door

Many of the houses on Roatan, and certainly in Nora's colony, have padlocks on the doors. Ownership of an actual deadbolt and a key can add to the safety of the house as well as a bit of status to a person's life. Vince created a proper doorway and we installed the door that we found sitting underneath the house.

The Front Door

The Front Door

The roof and interior wall.

While Vince resecured the roof, we helped Wynn build an interior wall.

I printed two photographs from my camera to hang on Nora’s new wall, one of the entire team sitting in the tires on the hill and the other of the three generations, Nora, her mother and her daughter. They were printed in black and white ink, since no store on the island had color ink, as well as plain copy paper. But they were sufficient to give as a parting gift for Nora’s to hang in her house.

The Final Day

We drove to the hill one last time. Nora and her mother were sitting in chairs, outside the house, waiting for us. The house was beautiful on the outside, but even moreso inside. She had hung up all the pictures that we found hidden under the bed and even some curtains. The fridge was wedged into a corner and some pots were hanging from nails in the beams we had built to secure the house.


“Life, health and more life.” I said to Nora as I hugged her goodbye. Walking down the road, away from Nora’s hill, I looked around to see it one more time. She turned her face in our direction, smiled and then climbed up her hill to her new home.

The House Before

The House After

Team Roatan '08

Team Roatan '08

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