Laying a Foundation

Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, are separated by more than the Rio Grande. While both border cities suffer from similar problems — high unemployment and a lack of low-cost housing, for example — the situation is especially dire in Juárez, where a typical family earns less than $40 a week and many poor families are forced to live in homes made from cardboard or tar paper.

For the past six years, Casas por Cristo, a charity in El Paso, has worked to improve the living conditions of the poorest people in its neighboring border city by recruiting church groups from all over the United States to build homes.

Since 1993, the charity and its teams of volunteers have built close to 700 homes — 200 of them this year.

“When you build a family a new house, then all those resources they would have used can go into education, health care, and other needs,” says Wesley Bell, the charity’s founder and director.

So far, more than 100 volunteer teams from churches in 37 states and two Canadian provinces have traveled to Juárez to build homes — a job that takes three to four days. Many of the volunteers are from church youth groups, Mr. Bell says. The volunteers raise the $2,500 to $4,500 needed to build the houses through their churches. The charity organizes and supervises the construction, and a panel of pastors from churches in Juárez identifies families who are most in need of a home.

While Mr. Bell says he has received requests to expand his group’s reach beyond Juárez, that is not likely to happen any time soon.

“There are 40,000 or more families that don’t have adequate housing in Juárez,” he says. “We’ve got a long ways to go.”

Here, volunteers assemble part of the frame of a house.