By Anna Walker
 courtesy of Anna walker/special to the crier TKA students build a home in Mexico last year. |
Nearly 40 high school students from Los Altos and Los Altos Hills will be among 560 students and volunteer adult leaders traveling to Tijuana, Mexico, for a week in April for The King’s Academy’s (TKA) 14th Annual Mexico Servant Safari.
The school, located in Sunnyvale, has built 140 homes over the past 14 years for impoverished families who previously lived in makeshift shacks without plumbing.
The group will caravan down in 80 vehicles to the outskirts of Tijuana and camp out in a field with 90 tents, 12 outhouses and a temporary kitchen crew. In addition to building 20 houses, they will work at a local orphanage doing repairs and activities with children and will host an afternoon “Kid’s Club” for neighborhood children and their families.
This year TKA students and staff will build 20 16-feet-by-20-feet, three-room, weatherproof homes for poor families living in slum conditions. Multiple rooms and an upstairs loft give the family its much needed privacy. Students frame, side, wire, roof, paint and drywall each residence, presenting families with a new set of keys at the end of the week.
In the overcrowded Tijuana community where TKA has built over the years, families live in houses made of cardboard with dirt floors, allowing minimal protection against the flood-ridden, winter conditions. With no electricity, plumbing or running water, disease and sickness is prevalent.
Vice Principal Paul Spates, a longtime Los Altos resident, came up with the idea to incorporate an annual Mexico Servant Safari into the school calendar after he traveled to Mexico more than 15 years ago. Spates said he saw a real opportunity for students to “become disengaged with everything they find comfort in, so they can be humbled and impacted through their service.”
Community service is not only encouraged for students who attend The King’s Academy, but all high school students are required to perform at least 40 hours of service every year in order to graduate. The annual Servant Safari provides an opportunity to fulfill the requirement. Most students consider the 14-hour trek south to be an enormous undertaking worth every minute.
TKA partners with Baja Vision Ministries, a non-profit organization, to provide the logistical support that allows TKA to start building quickly upon arrival. Baja Vision Ministries selects families that have legitimate needs and have obtained a small plot of land from the government.
“From the joy on their faces to offering a helping hand on the worksite, our family touched me in a special way,” student Serena Sundarajan said. “Mexico truly taught me the real definition of being a servant.”
TKA junior and Los Altos Hills resident Lindsay Pica said that after traveling to Mexico, she “notices more ways that I can help in my community.”
Some of the group will be assigned to work at The City of Angels Orphanage, co-founded by Sergio Gomez of Baja Vision Ministries. The son of a drug addict, Gomez said he knows what life on the streets is like. He said his compassion for orphaned and abandoned children provided him with the direction for this assignment. The group will make onsite improvements to the buildings, dormitories and bathroom facilities in addition to playing with the children.
