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ARIAL HOME INITIATIVE - UPDATE NUMBER 6 November 6, 2007 Many positive things have happened since our last Arial Home update. For example, the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper printed an excellent article by Ted Pincus on our Arial Home Initiative in today’s edition: http://www.suntimes.com/business/pincus/636365,CST-FIN-pincus06.article James Lucas finished a wonderful 8 minute summary of our last home building trip to Ensenada which you can view on You Tube or downloaded from our web site. Both links are on the main page of the site or on the Videos page. If it looks like the high definition video is going to take some time to download to your video viewer, cancel the download and click on the You Tube link which starts playing the video immediately. The interviews with the students who built the homes are very interesting. Ensenada Fires
The fire storms that hit Southern California did not stop at the Mexican border. Our favorite town of Ensenada was also victim to the hot Santa Ana winds. Fifty homes burnt to the ground in the hills above the city. This Thursday, Paul Saydak, John Charlton (from Loyola, Montreal), and Steve Zeis (from Cordeck, Kenosha, WI) will travel to Ensenada to start a humanitarian mission to help the victims of the fire. Unlike most Californians, the affected Mexican families had no home insurance, no savings accounts, and little government help. We helped buy tents and sleeping bags for them, but the major effort has to be rebuilding their homes. We are working with our partners at Youth With a Mission, San Diego, to do just that. YWAM has taken the lead on the rebuilding project. If you wish to help, there is information on the YWAM web site on how to do that: http://www.ywamsandiegobaja.org/ Our Arial Home team of volunteers’ first task is to increase the production capability of our Ensenada panel manufacturing plant so we can replace more of the homes with fireproof Arial Homes. My wife, Jane, and I leave Saturday for two weeks in Ensenada to assist with the factory upgrade and then to build the first Arial Home in the stricken neighborhood.
Our oldest daughter, Danielle, will be flying down from Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, CA, to join us for the build. Our other daughter, Megan, will fly out from Chicago to help construct this latest version of our Arial Home design, Version 4.0. Fittingly, the construction date is set for Thanksgiving Day, November 21, 2007. On Saturday, November 24, we will host a joyous celebration: a turkey dinner for all 11 families that have received Arial Homes since we started this ambitious project, as well as the families of our 5 full-time Arial Home factory workers. For those of you new to The Arial Home Initiative, this effort began on February 17, 2006, when Tom Pirelli was nailing hot black shingles to the plywood roof of a traditional wood home as part of a WPO/YWAM trip.
Tom was being taught how to attach shingles by veteran builder, Dana Regan, whose red bandana you can see just behind Tom on the roof. The entire time Tom was on the roof, he kept thinking that there had to be a better way of constructing roofs than to be laboriously nailing black shingles in the hot Mexican sun.
Over the next 10 years, we hope to replicate the Ensenada manufacturing plant in 250 of the poorest regions of the world. The goal is not only to build homes, but to create a thriving local economy around the modular home building business. When Can You Help Build an Arial Home? As you can tell, we are still on the steep part of the learning curve when it comes to finding a better way to build high quality, affordable homes for poor families. However, by the end of 2007, we believe that we will have a system that will enable us to ramp up the production and assembly of these homes to a rate that can support multiple home building trips by volunteers. Our next "open participation" trip is tentatively scheduled for February 11 – 14, 2008. If you would like to help build an Arial Home for a poor family in Ensenada, Mexico, that will be the time to join us. Our later trip, that will include teams of high school students, is tentatively set for June 16 – 19, 2008. This will be the next opportunity for your son or daughter to benefit from the unique experience of building a home for a desperately poor family. We will send another update from Ensenada once we have accomplished our goals for this trip. Wish us luck! -tom pirelli
Tom Pirelli The Arial Foundation
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The Arial Home Initiative is a Project of The Arial Foundation, Jupiter, FL The Arial Home Initiative reserves the right to use any photographs taken of volunteers and sites
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