Adopta Una Familia, Inc. Building homes and relationships in Guasmo Sur

In the Beginning - The Early Years In August 1999, 28 members and friends of the First Congregational Church left for Guayaquil, Ecuador, on what has become an annual trip to build bathrooms and houses in the barrio of Guasmo Sur. As we pulled off the paved highway, and onto the dirt roads of the barrio, everyone fell strangelysilent,lost in their own thoughts and thinking about the week ahead. The barriostretched as far as we could see, a city within a city, and as Dorothy once said "Toto,we'renot in Kansas anymore!” We were all terribly nervous at first about the poverty, the stray dogs, the trash fires burning in the streets, the open sewage ditches. Within moments of our arrival, we began to make new friends.

A welcoming ceremony was held on the paved soccer field, and we were introduced to our host families. It was these families who would share their homes, and even their beds with us, would feed us, and would work with us this next week. We were received with warmth, with joy and with a generosity of spirit which few of us had ever seen before.

Guasmo is an extremely impoverished community of 400,000 people in the Pacific port of Guayaquil. We lived with, worked with, and became friends with the families who participated in the community center of Mi Cometa. Many of the things which we take for granted, such as houses with floors and roofs, kitchens, and bathrooms were luxuries for our host families. This is Deysi in her outdoor kitchen area. The red bucket holds the water for washing up. As a result of our mission, Deysi how has a house, complete with bathroom and a kitchen!

Bathrooms generally mean running water. The bathrooms we built in Guasmo were not hooked into any kind of pumped water system. Instead, each home built a cement tower with a platform. A 55 gallon plastic cistern will be placed on top of each platform, and the water will flow by gravity. The few families which had indoor bathrooms had bathrooms of this type.Families share electric pumps which pump water from a non-potable street source into the cistern. In order to take a shower, flush a toilet or run a faucet, water needs to be in the cistern. When the cistern was empty, and the pump was broken, or someone else was using the pump, no water flowed.

Prior to our arrival, trucks had dumped 60 dump-truck loads of dirt (such as the one above), rocks and sand throughout the barrio. This was just the beginning! We moved these piles to fill in open patios which flood in the rainy season, and to make level ground on which to build the bathrooms. Even the kids worked all day long, without a word of complaint.

A family is overjoyed with its new bathroom!

The Middle Years Beginning Construction on Mi Cometa In August 2002, approximately 40 members and friends of First Congregational Church travelled to Guasmo Sur, to participate in Adopta Una Familia IV. This year the work involved construction of bathrooms, beginning work on a new community center for Mi Cometa, and a women's health clinic.