Each October Guatemala celebrates International Shelter Day. This year, Prensa Libre published a front-page picture of a little girl carrying a large, homemade cardboard-house with large, bold letters asking Jesus to make housing possible for her community.

Fifteen hundred people echoed the young girl’s desperation in a march to the Guatemalan Capital pleading the Congress to pass legislation to facilitate affordable housing for the many, many in need.

Need for Housing:
A full-page article on page ten of the same newspaper published statistics for the housing need in Guatemala according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE): the total number of Guatemalan families in need of adequate housing is 1,021,592.

Faced with the expressed felt necessity for housing, the San Lucas Parish operates its housing program with the participation of local people putting the program into action.

A Dignified Space:
Over the years, the San Lucas Parish housing program has built more than 1,600 houses. The early houses of 60 square meters under-the-roof have grown to 100 square meters, and the extra space is important to the families.

All houses have at least three bedrooms, a living room-dining room combination, kitchen, bathroom, and small storage room. For each household there is a sewerage system that works with a small septic tank and vertical drain field, the latter serving as a very effective sewerage system, although time-consuming and expensive to build. Most often, potable water and electricity must also be brought to the home, adding to the overall cost of the house but unavoidable when attempting to provide the “dignified space” that the people need.

Apprenticeship Program:
An outgrowth of the Parish’s response to the immediate effects of poverty in the community, the housing program also provide s training for young men in the community interested in learning as apprentices, providing on-the-job training for those seeking to learn a trade.

Using this method, houses are built by young men learning skills of stone-cutting, masonry, carpentry, welding, plumbing and electricity.

The families that are recipients of the housing program would not, otherwise, be able to pay for the cost of a house if it were not for the financial help of the Parish. Over the years, it has been found that families will pay what they can, when they can.

There are many and distinct housing programs from numerous Non-Governmental Organizations as well as Government Programs, though few deal with the fundamental necessity of housing: land. A country with the most inequitable land ownership in Latin America, proper housing on one’s own land is nearly impossible to acquire. As such, the Parish Housing Program seeks to address the land ownership disparity by providing both land and housing for those without.