Fund the Materials
Every volunteer pays their own travel and gives a week of work in Jadán. But labor alone doesn't finish a home — it takes cement, blocks, roofing, doors, and windows, all bought locally. Funding materials is how the people who can't make the trip build too.
What the Money Buys
Materials, bought locally in Ecuador. Cement, block, roofing, lumber, tile, tools — whatever the projects that year turn out to need.
Almost every project starts here. Floors, foundations, mortar for the block, the base of a shower. It comes by the bag, and a bathroom takes more of it than people expect.
The walls. Concrete block goes up fast and holds up in the weather, and it’s what most of Jadán is built from. It’s also the easiest thing to teach someone who has never built anything. It takes about 250 blocks to build a bathroom. We pay about $0.61 / block plus a delivery charge.
Mixed with cement they become everything else — mortar, concrete, the floor you end up standing on. Unglamorous, heavy, and nothing gets built without it.
A room isn’t finished until it closes. Doors that lock and windows that keep out the cold and the rain are often what separates a structure from a space someone can actually live in.
Usually the last day, and the job everybody wants. It seals the block and keeps the damp out, and it’s the moment a worksite stops looking like a worksite. Also on bigger projects or ones with shaky walls we need to reinforce with steel. This steel needs to be painted even though it will never be seen.
Where there’s no sewer line, a bio digester does what a septic system would — it breaks down waste on site. It’s the piece that makes an indoor bathroom possible at all.
Trowels, levels, buckets, shovels, picks, gloves, saws. Bought once, used hard for a week, used again the next year. Replacing what wears out is a small line that never goes away.
Give to the Jadán work projects
This is where you can buy the materials we need for the projects. Two hundred and fifty blocks make a bathroom. We buy locally wherever we can. For example: the blocks come from a family run business at the bottom of the mountain who make them and truck them up to the work site. A hundred dollars is roughly 160 blocks. Whatever you send, we will use to buy materials.
Every gift on this page goes to the Jadán work projects.
If you’d rather support something else we do, the donate page lets you choose.