A New Home, A New Life

The 325 square foot home was gift enough for the Hernandez family. Kensington Community Church in San Diego partnered with the nonprofit Casas de Luz (Houses of Light) to build the new home for them in a colonia outside Tijuana, Mexico. Volunteers built the home in two days and took turns offering heartfelt blessings for Ana Christina and her four children who will live there. But a house is not just four walls and a roof. Our House-to-Home initiative attends to the little things: toothbrushes, can openers, and other items that transform a new space and bring dignity and joy to families emerging from poverty and/or homelessness.

For this mom, who makes the equivalent of $70 a week working as a housekeeper in Mexico, brand new pillows were a luxury she could not even imagine. She wiped away tears, telling us that the angels involved in this project had changed her life…forever, she said, after a pause. Our volunteers are changed forever, too, being able to furnish a home built by hand by other children of God. We go to sleep at night under the same stars, grateful to have pillows on which to lay our heads.