The idea of the Hands Foundation was really cultivated upon our return from the first trip to Mexico. We wanted to go somewhere, get our hands dirty and just help as many people as we could. Well on that first trip we encountered things we’ve never been able to forget. The poverty level there was high. People were building houses out of anything they could get there hands on as you will see in the pictures below. There are plots of land in the desert where they are allowed to build. They dig into hill sides and set up a house. Dirt floors, no water, no bathrooms, nothing. Toilets are a bucket out back or a hole in the ground. The water they use comes on a truck once a week and gets dumped into barrells in front of their house. This is poverty. This is as real as it gets. 

We were able to help in our own small way that first year patching a rooftop on a senior living facility. It was grueling work pulling buckets of mix up the side of the building with rope and mixing it by hand on the rooftop. Then hauling the concrete with wheelbarrows to its destination. It was just what the doctor ordered for us and we knew we had to do it again. We were hooked. The idea then came to build houses for the people living in the shack communities all around the city. There was a man down there who had a camp we stayed at that first year. His name was Oscar Martinez. This would prove to be a crucial meeting as Oscar would be the man to find the families each year that we would build for. He would do the early leg work to find out who was most in need and screen those eligible to make sure it was a good situation. That began a now six year annual trip to go and help the people of Mexico. We continue to fly south every year to build and are always seekng volunteers. There is nothing like getting away and working sun-up to sun-down every day for a week doing something good for someone else. If you have the opportunity to do so, join us. Just to reinterate, all money donated goes directly to the project at hand. No labor cost, no administrative cost. So if you want to volunteer, you will have to pay your own way down. Our goals in the future for this project are to add more houses each year and get that number as high as possible. That takes money and volunteer help. If we have to, we’ll the three of us go down there and do it all ourselves.