Burt Hunt heads to Rocky Point at least once each month. But the Valley resident doesn't go to relax on the beach. He spends his weekends working in the sun, building homes for the poor and giving food to the needy. Some of the nearly 40 Valley volunteers have been making the monthly trip for almost six years..

It smells. A neighbor's sewage is draining into the dirt street next to the Martinez house. Stray dogs run around the trickle. Like the Mexican children playing in the road, 48-year-old Phoenix resident Burt Hunt is used to the smell.

His team of Valley volunteers has been visiting the same village in Mexico for nearly six years. In the summer, they distribute food and toys. In the winter they bring sleeping bags and blankets, and they build a house a month all year long.

Today Margarita Martinez looks on hopefully as nearly 30 Americans hammer and measure what will be a new home for her and her three children. Their current residence, an unsealed row of cinder blocks, is capped by shipping crates, old carpet and auto parts.

The Martinez' home will be the seventh that Hunt and his group, American International Ministries (AIM) have built in Puerto Penasco, better known to Americans as Rocky Point. Over the past six years, Hunt has led a string of late-model SUVs packed with supplies and volunteers down to Colonia Oriente, a neighborhood that used to be the Rocky Point city dump. "A lot of their houses are built out of whatever they can find in the dump to build it out of," Hunt explains of the motley shelters.

Like Hunt, most of those building the home today work air-conditioned Valley office jobs the rest of the time. The last weekend of each month they leave the office, change into work clothes and drive to Mexico for the weekend. Today they're drinking water and taking breaks in the shade. It's about 114 degrees with 30 percent humidity.

Pneumonia Claimed Six Villagers Last Winter

It takes about six hours to drive here from Desert Springs Bible Church, the Northeast Phoenix base of operations for the group. Roughly 350 miles from the middle-upper-class Scottsdale neighborhood, many of these Mexican homes are literally composed of shipping crates.

Last winter four village children and two adults died from pneumonia. "The wind just blows right through these little houses," Hunt says of shelters like the Martinez' old home. "We bring blankets and sleeping bags down, but the children just can't get warm, no matter how many they put on."

Hunt and Brazilian Christian missionaries Juaro and Rose Silva had long been bringing food and supplies to the village when they heard of the pneumonia deaths. "When I heard about the kids dying in the winter, I thought, you know what, we can do something for this. We had garage sales, movie nights at church, anything to raise money," Hunt says.

He recalls one winter night when he slept in one of the Mexican houses; even with a thermal sleeping bag he couldn't keep warm from the humid, chilled ocean gusts. "Many don't need a whole house, but the roof leaks," Hunt explains. "People get wet when it rains. The children get sick. The colds become pneumonia."

So last March the group surprised some families by repairing their leaky roofs. As the repairs became more and more extensive, Hunt devised a plan to build entire houses that would last longer and seal out the winter storms.

"We prayed about it and within two weeks a contractor said, 'you know what, I'll just give you the materials you need,'" Hunt says of the first home they built. "This is 98-percent God and two-percent us," he adds.

Extreme Makeover

The houses aren't much by American standards: one large room with a drywall partition in the middle. But the sturdy roof, insulated door and sealed windows provide a shelter otherwise unattainable for many of these families. It's a makeover more dramatic and extreme than any TV show can offer.

The Martinez family makes the equivalent of about $30 to $40 a week. The price of food in Mexico is about the same as in the U.S., and the lumber at the Mexican lumber yard actually costs more than at a Phoenix Home Depot.

The entire cost of this house, about $2,950, is more than the father, Mr. Martinez, will make in an entire year of work picking up odd jobs in the area. But this money doesn't come from the budget of a multimillion dollar makeover TV show, it comes from the pockets of the church members and volunteers who come down month after month. This weekend, each of the 48 volunteers paid $110 to fund the entire trip: gas, food and building supplies. Some weekends the group is as small as 10. Lately, it has numbered nearly 40.

The group also brings toys for the children, and each fall Hunt organizes a sleeping bag drive. "Last year we took about 60 sleeping bags to an extremely poor part of the community," he explains. "One man's house was made of wood pallets. He was so overwhelmed that somebody from America brought him a sleeping bag. That night he walked about three miles in the dark just to thank us."

A World of Difference

Deacon Hayes, a senior studying philosophy at ASU, says he never imagined the poverty just south of the border. Hayes and three other college students from Scottsdale Bible Church are among nearly 20 volunteers making the trip for the first time. They represent one of six churches whose members met for the first time before driving to Mexico, where they would sweat together and share sleeping quarters.

"The best way to put it is that everybody comes there for the same reason," construction manager Ruddy Erdmann says of the individual churches' unified labor. "They come to donate their time, their talents and their love. They donate respect for people who don't have what we have," he adds.

Hayes is taking a break on a couch that sits in the dirt next to the construction site. The Martinez children and neighbors gather around him, smiling, pointing and speaking Spanish. "What's your name?" they ask. Many of the children wear clothes the AIM group has brought in previous visits. "I used to come down here to party," Hayes says of Rocky Point. "I never even saw this side of the town. It feels great to be coming down for a higher purpose."

Erdmann, who works in the Valley as a framing consultant, says, "We've seen what those people need. Combine that with some abilities, talents and time. There's no better feeling. There's nothing better you could do with your time."

Less than a mile away from the construction site, beach homes line the seashell-laden beach at Las Conchas. Million-dollar homes overlook the blue-green Sea of Cortez. Driveways are spotted with Lexus, Mercedes and Acuras wearing Arizona and California plates.

Rocky Point is in the midst of a real estate boom, with thousands of condominium units rising from the white beach sand. The cheapest condo available in the area costs around $265,000 and is about four times the size of the un-insulated cinderblock and plywood homes a mile away. The money being injected into Rocky Point's real estate market is not reaching villages like this, where the average unskilled worker makes $10 to $20 a day.

Do Unto Others

About three blocks from today's home site, half of the AIMS volunteers are assembling bags of food for families. Pastor Carlos, who leads the Mexican church in the village, works with the Americans to distribute the food bags to the neediest families.

"The little bag of food we take them. I've been down there sometimes weeks later and they're still trying to make that bag work," Hunt says of the plastic grocery bag filled with beans, vegetables and canned goods. Mexican neighbors wander in and out of the open door of the church while the volunteers form an assembly line to stuff the bags.

Soon they will fill the bed of a pickup with grocery bags filled with food.

"One time on the way out of town we had a box of potatoes. We left about 12-15 potatoes with a woman and her kids," Hunt says. "We discovered in town she had lost her job, had no food or money. Those potatoes fed her family for more than a week."

Retired Valley doctors frequently join the volunteers, and the group is now saving for money to build a medical clinic. "God always provides someone," Hunt says of the needs he considers both physical and spiritual. "We go down there because there's more need there, and that's where God has us working right now," he adds.

Back at the new home site, Wes Cradock, a North Scottsdale resident and health sales professional, tightens the screws into the doorknob of the nearly finished home. "Once you start coming, you just can't stop," he says. Moments later, Cradock looks on and smiles as Hunt hands the keys to Mr. Martinez and his wife. In one weekend, five lives were completely changed.

Hunt says the trip is not limited to churches or church attendees. He invites anybody who wants to help to come.
To donate food or clothing, call: 602-390-1542
If you would like to go, call: 602-390-1542