LIVE DIFFERENT
In the spring of 2016 and 2017, I was given the opportunity to bus down to a small town south of Tijuana to build houses with an organization called live different. I would sort bottles every Saturday evening for eight months at the community church in preparation for these trips. When we arrived at each location, we were greeted by the family we would be building the house for. Building alongside the locals was a life-changing experience. We didn’t use any big machines to construct the buildings, and every scrap of wood was used (we even built a small dog house to use up materials). When I returned a year later, it was great to see how the family had transformed the house we had built into a home. In addition, they had made many cisterns and canals to catch rainwater for the gardens and installed solar so that they could see when it got dark. After witnessing this level of sustainability in a home for the first time, I felt inspired to design green.
