Last Tuesday we heard from Zion Yua, a work colleague of Dimitri’s at Thurber Engineering. Zion is a young geo-environmental engineer with a passion for helping others. He believes in approaching problems with action first. He said that young people in heir twenties are very time challenged as they are busy with their careers and lives. When they decide to make the commitment to help others they like to be able to really make a difference and learn about other people and places at the same time.
Zion’s commitment to helping others began in High School in Chilliwack, B.C., when he decided to get a group of friends together to help other people in the local community. In 2011, when the Tohoku earthquake struck Japan, he decided that he needed to go and help there. He spent several weeks helping clean up debris in the aftermath and in the process he met people from all over who had just decided to pick up and come on their own to help in some way.
This inspired him once he returned to Canada to get together with a group of friends to find a project that they could all help with. He heard through one of these friends about opportunities to build homes for people in the San Quentin valley of Baja Mexico. Most of the people there are descendants of Ouaxacan migrant workers who came there to work in the vegetable and fruit growing farms of the region. Their housing conditions are very poor, usually no running water or electricity and their homes are often built using whatever is at hand, such as packing crates, cardboard, sheets, and plastic held together by strapping or rope. They work in the fields and usually make about nine US dollars a day. Unfortunately, other costs such as school uniforms for their children, cost one hundred dollars a year, and the children are not allowed to attend school without them.
These house building projects are done by many different groups. He and his friends decided to partner with Youth With A Mission (YWAM) to help to build homes for two families in 2016 and also in 2017. They would need to fundraise to cover the cost of building materials and other supplies, in addition to personally covering their own travel and accommodation expenses. Since neither he nor his friends knew nothing about building homes, they learned framing and roofing by watching you tube videos. In August of 2016 they travelled to Baja and built two homes. They had to learn by doing, how to use carpenter’s tools such as hammers, tape measures and saws. The homes were very basic, twenty by twenty two foot, wood frame homes, built on a concrete slab, with rolled roofing on top. They built counters and bunk beds and also provided mattresses, tables and new outhouses. The homes still have no running water or electricity, as these are not available in the neighbourhood they are in. In addition, they provided school uniforms for the children. In 2017 they returned and built two more homes for two more families.
He said that he and his friends are now looking for another opportunity to help others and are looking at several different projects they might be able to help with. It was inspiring for our group to hear about this small group of friends who have independently taken it upon themselves to make the commitment of time and money to help others.
