While most local youngsters spent their spring break enjoying time off from school, a group of students with the Fountain Hills High School’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes dedicated part of their break to build homes for the less fortunate.

The group of 36 students traveled to Puerto Penasco, also commonly referred to as Rocky Point, to spend three days building two houses from the ground up for families who had been diligently working toward a home and, up until then, living in tents.

“There is a system in the program we went through where the people whose houses we are building do community service to qualify for a home,” FCA club sponsor Willie Dudley explained. “That service can come from a skillset they have, cleaning up the community or cooking for it.”

One of the homes that local students built was for a family consisting of an 85-year-old grandmother, her daughter and son-in-law, and her grandchildren.

“We built them a 24x10-foot home with one door, two rooms and bathroom with a window, plus two more windows,” Dudley said. “I would say that seeing how grateful they (the family) were for so little, it made me realize how ungrateful I am for how much I have.”

The students on the trip also found the experience to be a humbling one.

“It was interesting because, where we were building the house, you could see all the resorts in Puerto,” freshman Hafeez Ahmed-Momoh said. “To me it was cool to think about; were I had friends that went to resorts in Mexico, I was building a house in Mexico that will help these people in the future.”

The students, even though they spent all day working, got to meet and spend time with the family whose house they were building.

“During the day, when we were building, one of the granddaughters was around,” said Ahmed-Momoh. “I’m not fluent, I am only in Spanish I, but it was cool to try and hold a conversation with her and learn more about them.”

Building a house is not an easy feat in what is considered normal conditions, but it was even harder for the students in Puerto where the ground is sand, even though they were six miles from the beach.

“You have to dig just about three feet into the sand to reach solid ground,” freshmen Evyn Lappe said. “We probably had 100 to 120 wheelbarrows full of cement that we mixed, just for the foundation.”

Even though it was a difficult experience building a home, Lappe wanted to go on the trip to grow closer with his classmates.

“I just moved here a little while ago and I thought it would be a way to make connections with people I hadn’t met before,” Lappe said. “It was also a way to make relationships I already had better. I also wanted to serve.”

The three-day trip ended with a celebration not for the students but for the seven families which the program, 1Mission, helped. Combined, the families had put in hundreds of hours of community service to earn a home.

The driving factor behind the trip to Mexico, as well as the resurgence of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes club in FHHS, is senior Garrett Renner.

“Garrett came to me last year and said I want to take a team to Mexico,” Dudley said. “I told him okay, if you do it I will go with you and sponsor you, not sure that he could pull it off…He got money for it, he got tax donations for it and he got people to go. He worked his tail off. He did a terrific job and he did it all.”

Renner, who had heard about the 1Mission program through family friends, had his work cut out for him to make the trip a reality.

“We had to raise over $13,000,” Renner said. “We also had to go through what felt like too much paperwork, but we ended up getting it all done. It really went well and looking back at it, yes it was hard, but it was definitely worth it.”

Renner enjoyed the experience of taking his fellow students to a place very much unlike Fountain Hills and exposing them to other ways of life.

“I definitely think for quite a few people it was an eye-opening experience,” Renner said. “Building a house that is 20x10 feet big, a little two-bedroom house for a family of four. I think when they (the students) thought ‘house,’ this wasn’t what they were expecting. Just seeing how happy these families were for so little, I think for a lot of the students was an eye-opener.”

Renner’s favorite memory from the trip was when one the families cooked for them as a thank you for the work the students had done.

“On the last day the family actually made us stingray tacos,” Renner said. “So we got to all come together at the house, the family cooked and it was my first time having stingray. Everyone in Fellowship got to gather together, though, it was a cool experience to see our accomplishment.”

The Fellowship of Christian Athletes meets every other Wednesday during lunch.