A Happy New Year For This MicroAid Family

I am pleased to report that we have finished the house for our beneficiary family in Juchitan, Oaxaca, Mexico. Their original house was destroyed in the Chiapas earthquake in 2017.

The four-month construction went smoothly, and my time in Juchitan, a Zapotec town in rural Oaxaca, overseeing the project, was mostly comfortable and interesting.

The family is extremely grateful, and they know that MicroAid is comprised of many individual donors that make this work possible.

Here are some before-and-after pictures of what we accomplished. The site is on a very narrow alley, so it was difficult to get perspective—my apologies.

This was the makeshift structure they were living in, before we took it down and started building.

This is the new facade.

Here is the old bedroom where the entire family of six was sleeping.

Here is the new bedroom and sleeping loft.

This was their old “bathroom.”

And the new one.

As you can see, this is really a night-and-day difference. Their life, and for generations to come, will be dramatically different. They will be safer, healthier, and more able to sleep and study, and get on with the tasks of everyday living.

This is the matriarch of the family, Eleazar. Whether she was bringing me a chair at our first meeting, or proudly overseeing her new family home, she was always kind and generous with me, and appreciative of the gift we were giving her and her family.