Case Study: The Bates Brothers
“A house is made of walls and beams... a home is made of love and dreams.”
That may explain why thousands of Navajo Indians barely survive in flat-topped boxes, crammed into a few hundred square feet. Baseboards peel, windows don’t close, and the interior panels are pasted with duct tape and a prayer. In outlying tribal communities, scattered across southwest mesas and prairies, thousands of Navajos haul water by hand to “houses” where they struggle to keep warm in below freezing temperatures huddled next to wood stoves.
Fewer than half of all “houses” have what we know as finished bathrooms or kitchens. More than one third have no electricity. Many are lit by the simple glow of a kerosene lantern because power lines are nowhere to …show more content…
In this particular November 2016 case, two weeks’ worth of labor pounded into four, 24-hour days.
Along with an unlikely team of feisty mothers, children, grandmothers and a group of all-around “good guys” ranging from age 60 to 10 years old, the Bates Brothers led the charge to change and save a family’s life with one of their “crete” houses. 43 percent of Navajos subsist below the federal poverty line of $24,250 for a family of four and 49 percent of reservation households report an annual income of less than $25,000. 44 percent of adult Navajos on the reservation have not finished high school, and only seven percent have college degrees. Just 22 percent of Navajo adults hold full-time jobs.
Showing and telling these resilient people, home to the largest Native American tribe in the United States extending into Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, covering more than 27,000 square miles (about the size of West Virginia) that they don’t have to live this way, is something they don’t believe until they can see it with their own
That may explain why thousands of Navajo Indians barely survive in flat-topped boxes, crammed into a few hundred square feet. Baseboards peel, windows don’t close, and the interior panels are pasted with duct tape and a prayer. In outlying tribal communities, scattered across southwest mesas and prairies, thousands of Navajos haul water by hand to “houses” where they struggle to keep warm in below freezing temperatures huddled next to wood stoves.
Fewer than half of all “houses” have what we know as finished bathrooms or kitchens. More than one third have no electricity. Many are lit by the simple glow of a kerosene lantern because power lines are nowhere to …show more content…
In this particular November 2016 case, two weeks’ worth of labor pounded into four, 24-hour days.
Along with an unlikely team of feisty mothers, children, grandmothers and a group of all-around “good guys” ranging from age 60 to 10 years old, the Bates Brothers led the charge to change and save a family’s life with one of their “crete” houses. 43 percent of Navajos subsist below the federal poverty line of $24,250 for a family of four and 49 percent of reservation households report an annual income of less than $25,000. 44 percent of adult Navajos on the reservation have not finished high school, and only seven percent have college degrees. Just 22 percent of Navajo adults hold full-time jobs.
Showing and telling these resilient people, home to the largest Native American tribe in the United States extending into Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, covering more than 27,000 square miles (about the size of West Virginia) that they don’t have to live this way, is something they don’t believe until they can see it with their own