LETHBRIDGE – Stephen Amonson sure has a story to tell. The president and general manager of Ashcroft Builders recently returned from a nine-day journey to El Salvador. He was one of 25 volunteers from Alberta who travelled to the country to build homes for people living in extreme poverty.
“It’s really a mud hut,” Amonson said. “The walls are made out of – they use sticks and they cross them and then they pack mud on either side of them to make walls.”
Amonson said the group arrived in the middle of the night and he couldn’t believe what he saw when he woke up.
“I’ve been to Latin America, I’ve been to Mexico before. I’ve seen people live in poverty, but this sort of goes beyond that,” he said.
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“It is quite shocking to see. It’s night and day…Even the new home that we built would pale in comparison to what we build here.”
The families who received the new homes had to help build other homes before or after receiving one of their own.
Amonson said the last family who received a home moved him the most.
“At one point I had tears just flowing down my face, and she reached over and grabbed my hand and asked why I was crying and I said, ‘It bothers me. It bothers me greatly to look at the conditions that you are living in, to see such poverty.’ She just smiled the biggest smile and said, ‘It’s okay! It’s okay to be poor, Steph, just not too poor,'” Amonson said.
The new homes have locks on the doors so the family can leave and go to a job without worrying about being robbed.
Amonson said even though the homes may not get them out of poverty, it helps.
“I think ultimately what I processed is that poverty used to be defined as a lack of material things.
“I now define it as a lack of opportunity, a lack of assets, and a lack of hope. A house signifies a solution to all of those in some way.”
Amonson has already booked his – and 18 other volunteers’ – trip to El Salvador for February 2017.
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