When Hurricane Dolly hit Brownsville, Texas, in 2008, Esperanza Avalos was at the home she shared with her daughter, three grandchildren, and her dying husband. Like most homeowners in the rural Luz del Cielo colonia, less than a half-mile from the U.S.-Mexico border, the Avaloses had built the house themselves, adding new bedrooms to accommodate their multigenerational family as money allowed.
Dolly’s 85 mile-per-hour winds shattered windows, shifted the floor precipitously and cracked the roof in places where rooms had been adjoined. “Everything was drenched,” Avalos says. “Then came the termites, eating the house from the inside.”
Avalos, whose husband passed away four days after the storm, sought help restoring her home. In doing so, she became a participant in a pilot program that not only seeks to produce temporary-to-permanent housing quickly after disasters, but one that may also point the way to a broader solution for families like hers who, out of necessity, build their homes one step at a time.
[For more on this story by Daniel Tyx, go to http://www.yesmagazine.org/iss...-in-a-hurry-20180604]
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