By Jacqueline Gilvard Landry
Voice correspondent

Building a humble house for a disadvantaged family in Tijuana, Mexico, in April was just part of a larger mission for 29 volunteers from St. Augustine and Newman Hall-Holy Spirit parishes.

Lizzie Bruce and Eilish O’Kelly hammer nails into a roof section for the house they were building in the Nuevo Millenia neighborhood of Tijuana in conjunction with Corazon. The 30-year-old organization, based in Santa Ana, has built more than 900 homes in Mexico.

“It has something to do with taking a spiritual and psychological journey,” said Walt Sears, director of adult education at Oakland’s St. Augustine Parish who organized the Oakland and Berkeley contingent for the Corazon-affiliated mission. Corazon is a volunteer group that builds and repairs homes in Baja California.

“It is particularly exciting” for the 11 teens and eight young adults in the group who feel “they are extending a hand for the poor as Jesus did,” he said.

“I think a lot of our young people are used to seeing wealth . . . and don’t imagine anything else,” Sears said. “They have not seen the kind of poverty there is below the border.”

That was true of Eilish O’Kelly, a St. Augustine parishioner and seventh-grader at the Bentley School in Oakland. “It was so eye-opening,” said the 13-year-old. “We went from San Diego with all these beautiful trees to complete poverty.”

“It just gives you a whole new perspective on life,” O’Kelly added. “Now I look at everything as a privilege more than a need or want.”

This was O’Kelly’s first Corazon mission, but even returning volunteers on the three-day trip were affected by the conditions they saw.

Taking the basics for granted

“It’s always a good reminder of how fortunate we are in the U.S. We take for granted the basics of our life — running water, electricity — that much of the rest of the world does not have,” said Ferdinand Ramos, an IT manager and member of Newman Hall-Holy Spirit Parish in Berkeley.

Ramos said he was making his third mission trip with his 16-year-old daughter, Elena. “It has become a priority for us since we know how rewarding it is,” he said.

The build is a powerful reminder. Sears said the house his group built — wood walls on a concrete slab with no electricity, plumbing or insulation — is “more of a nice shed.”

“The sobering thing — what we consider a shed is more than what the people had,” he said.

The recipient family earned the house by participating in hundreds of hours of community service in Corazon projects in the neighborhood. With additional service hours they will be able to “purchase” upgrades such a inside drywall and a finished bathroom. Before qualifying, they must attend gardening and child abuse prevention classes and prove a right to the piece of land.

‘I was the cut man’

The building project took place on April 25, flanked by travel days. A Corazon foreman directed the build, Sears said, and had O’Kelly painting and hammering, and St. Augustine’s John Belanger running the saw. “I was the cut man,” said the 44-year-old general contractor from Oakland.

Like Sears, Belanger said this is his fourth mission. He plans to return next year. “It is one of the few things that I do in my life that gets me out of my comfort zone,” he said.

Belanger sees the mission as “a way to participate in ‘God’s economy,’ one in which I focus on giving and building up community while getting back far more than I would receive as an individual focused on self-satisfaction.”

Other volunteers agreed they got back more from the mission than they were giving up, like family time, work, and for O’Kelly, a school dance. “It was most certainly worth missing” for the trip, she said.

Samuel Geselbracht, a 17-year-old Oakland Technical High School senior, had a similar attitude. “I realized this trip was much more productive than any other event an average teenager could think of for a weekend,” he said.

This was the second Corazon mission for Geselbracht, who is a Newman Hall-Holy Spirit parishioner and lives in Oakland. He will attend Marquette University in the fall.

These girls, along with the young boy on the cover of The Voice, live in the Nuevo Millenia neighborhood where Corazon is building houses.

In addition to their time commitment, each volunteer had to contribute $250 towards the $14,000 cost of the trip, supplementing parish support and donations, Sears said. Members of St. Mary Magdalene Parish in Berkeley were among the supporters although none of their parishioners were able to make the trip. A portion of the funds go towards the purchase of the building supplies.

The weekend included a 500-mile, day-long van ride — each way. But the missioners agreed that it’s all part of the journey. The road trip “serves for us to get to know one another on a personal basis, to share in fellowship and in many cases, share our Catholic faith with one another,” Ramos said.

One way the group celebrated their faith, Sears said, was with a Eucharistic service they held on the drive back, at a beach near San Juan Capistrano. “It was a very soothing ceremony,” Geselbracht said.

Sears also had the youth use the ride as time to write down the “masks” they wanted to shed during the trip. He said these were “the identities we carry…that may not be who we truly are or were meant to be in Christ,” like jock, diva or geek. In a ritual that night, “we burned them in the fire at the foot of the cross,” he said.

Geselbracht said he burned his “judgmental” mask. “I believe by giving this up I was able to see the beauty in the build and the beauty in the family’s excitement for a new house,” he said.

O’Kelly said the family did not speak English, but told their interpreter (her mother, Frances O’Kelly) “how much they appreciated what we did.”

Both Eilish O’Kelly and Ramos expressed hope that their work also boosted the impression of Americans overall.

Geselbracht thinks the missioners succeeded: “As we were leaving Mexico, a man saw the Corazon drawing on the side of our van and told our driver Danny that we were from good people. I was very proud to be a part of that group.”

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