Impacting the Next Generation

Asunta Vilches and her family have found “space and comfort” in their two-bedroom Habitat house.

Porongo, Bolivia, is a small town about a half-hour outside the city of Santa Cruz. The quickest travel route between the two locations, when it’s not the rainy season, is a drive across the Pirai River in a four-by-four truck. Families from Porongo — many of them fruit pickers and vendors, the area’s main occupation — sit on the river banks, children laughing and splashing in the brown waters.

A bumpy dirt road picks up on the other side of the river and leads into the heart of tiny Porongo: a green city square that doubles as a soccer field. In the past three years, Habitat for Humanity has built with 24 families in this leafy, lush village, and the Vilches clan was the first.

Asunta Vilches first heard about Habitat for Humanity from one of her sons, a construction and engineering student at a university in nearby Santa Cruz. The single mother of six works at the local school, cleaning the facility every day and helping with the children whenever she’s needed. She had long wanted a bigger, sturdier house, she says, but was unable to save the money required for construction.

The family’s previous house was a small structure made of mud and wood, with a roof of palm and no bathroom. The Habitat house is made of sturdy brick, its two bedrooms allowing the family to spread out a bit more. Twenty-two-year-old Linbarg says the biggest improvement for the family is “the tranquility, the space and the comfort. We wash, and we have a good bed in the night.”

Linbarg and his brothers and sisters — including 27-year-old Rolando, 23-year-old Miguel Adolfo and 23-year-old daughter Mariela — are all university students, who travel back and forth to Santa Cruz to study and work. Asunta’s older children live in the surrounding neighborhood. The kids went to the initial Habitat meetings with their mother, encouraging her throughout the process and pitching in once construction began on the family’s home. “We knew that we could make the house,” says Miguel Adolfo, the construction student. “We helped with all you could do in the construction.”

A smiling Asunta invites visitors into the house her family built together, showing off preparations for a party they will host later that evening. “Thanks to you,” Asunta says, “because now I have my little house, mi casita. It was very important for my life.”