In 2008, I joined TECHO, a youth-led NGO that fights social injustice and poverty by building emergency housing in informal settlements across Latin America. Most volunteers were undergraduate students who dedicated weekends or holidays to work in marginalized urban and rural communities. I first heard about TECHO through a college friend and signed up to help build houses.

I didn’t even know how to properly use a shovel or a hammer at first, but I learned. Along with my group, we built homes through hard manual work. Looking back, what stayed with me was not the labor itself, but the time spent with the families and children, and the friendships formed with fellow volunteers.

After several construction projects, I became part of the “detection team” for the Caribbean zone of Costa Rica. Our task was to identify new communities in need of safer living conditions. We knocked on doors, spoke with community leaders, and listened to the stories of families who welcomed us into their homes, always with sweet coffee and deep generosity.

We then returned with larger groups of volunteers to survey families and assess needs. The hardest part came after: choosing which families would receive one of the 20 houses we could build, knowing that 35 or more urgently needed them. At 25 years old, my team and I found ourselves debating difficult questions: Does the single mother with three children need a home more than the elderly couple without a pension?

During construction, families often worked alongside us or cooked meals to share. Two realities came together: us, privileged university students, and them, vulnerable families working in construction, banana, or pineapple plantations. Hearing how they lost homes and belongings to floods after extreme rainfalls gave me my first push toward working on water and resilience.

At the time, it felt like we were doing only a small part for those families. But looking back, I realize the deeper impact was on us, the volunteers. Many later became professionals in government or housing, carrying forward lessons learned in those communities. The real change was in how TECHO shaped us into people determined to use our skills to help marginalized families and build resilience.

If you would like to know more about Techo and the work they do in Latin America you can visit their webpage HERE