My name is Chris Luders and I'm a fourth year Industrial Engineering student at Georgia Tech. I created this page to document the Habitat for Humanity service trip I took this past summer to Nicaragua. The day after the semester concluded, a group of thirteen Georgia Tech students departed for Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua. We were some of the few passengers on our flight to Nicaragua -- since the country is only second to Haiti in the western hemisphere in terms of poverty, there isn't too much demand to head over to Nicaragua. A picture of the group in our sparsely populated plane is below
We packed in the bus and headed over to our home for the week, Entrada Camp MEFEL. MEFEL is a missionary organization in Nicaragua that focuses its outreach on the poorest of the poor -- in a country like Nicaragua, they're not too hard to find. The camp was amazing -- the woman running the facility cooked us great food for every lunch and dinner, we ran into a couple of Georgia Tech alumni who were a part of MEFEL, and, best of all, there was both a monkey and a plethora of hammocks in our camp! After a hard day of work, there was nothing I loved more than relaxing in a hammock.
The vast majority of our week was spent on the construction site. Our work was performed in the village of Tipitapa, about 30 minutes outside of Managua. In the middle of a rather desolate field there, Habitat is building approximately 250 houses out of concrete. While we were in Nicaragua, our team helped construct three additional houses, kicking off the sixth phase of the Habitat construction project in the process. The work was hard, and the days were extremely hot, long, and dry. It was definitely an interesting experience to work in construction in a third world country -- we manually made our own rebar to pour cement over, as opposed to using the manufactured rebar that is a mainstay of construction in our own company.
All in all, the trip was an amazing experience that I won't soon forget! Despite their own poverty, the Nicaraguan people were beautiful men and women who held on to hope for a better future for their country and for their children. Below is a picture of the family who would receive one of the houses we built while in Nicaragua. Their hope and joy amazed me, and our group was so happy to help them out by spending a week on construction in Nicaragua!
My trip to Nicaragua was a highlight of my summer, and I have to thank the President's Scholarship Program for making it possible through the Fleet Scholarship! Thanks!
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Contact Chris at cluders@gatech.edu!