WASILLA — While some Mat-Su Valley students spent their spring break playing video games and watching television, a group of local teens spent their time away from school living in tents, showering with buckets and building homes for the poor.

Victoria Matson, 16, was one of a group of 15 teens and adult leaders from Church on the Rock to spend her time off building a pair of houses just outside Tijuana, Mexico. She said the opportunity to help those less fortunate helped draw her to a week of travel and labor rather than rest and relaxation.

“I know I can do that whenever I want,” she said. “This was a unique opportunity.”

(Use arrows above to view more photos)

At a time when national news is dominated by America’s struggling economy, Matson said seeing how the poor in Mexico live their lives was an eye-opening and humbling experience.

“It made me think about the people there and how poor they are and how they live,” Matson said. “And yet, they’re still happy with their lives. It makes me think that we’re really spoiled, pretty much, and we don’t need half the things we have. But, we get all mad if we don’t have those things.”

Wayne Salmans helped supervise the teens, making his second trip to Mexico. While there, the church group built a house for a family and helped build another after a fire destroyed their shack. While in Mexico, the group lived in tents and showered by pouring buckets over each other, he said.

“The coolest thing for me was to see those kids get out of their Myspace world and get down and see what real poverty is really like,” Salmans said. “We actually camped out for the whole week in a gravel pit, cooking our own food and taking bucket showers at night.”

In the area outside Tijuana, the people live in what most in Alaska would consider run-down shacks and earn about $20 a week, Matson said. What she was impressed with was how hard they work for the little they have.

“I feel like we were really helpful and we made a huge difference in their lives,” she said. “For me, it wasn’t that much, but for them it was a lot.”

In addition to building simple homes for two families, the group also purchased a $100 water filter that has a lifetime guarantee. Although $100 seems like a small amount, it will improve the quality of life for those living there, Salmans said.

“It was cool to see how these kids stepped up to the plate and worked hard, and to see how much it means to those families,” he said. “That we could leave them a house they could live in, and that for $100 you can give them clean water, that was great.”

Church on the Rock made a similar trip during spring break last year and decided the work was important enough to repeat, Salmans said. Although other missionary efforts to the area canceled because of some instability in the region, the local group didn’t run into any problems.

The trip was also an unexpected boon for another family in Mexico. A different mission group was working on a house for the family when a fire destroyed their shack and all the materials to build the new structure. Because the other mission group had to leave, the Wasilla group pitched in to finish the job, Salmans said.

“Because our guys did such an awesome job (finishing the first house early) they were able to build them a house too,” he said. “The biggest lesson to hit them was we just don’t appreciate what we have.”

Doing something selfless for others pays the largest rewards, Salmans said, a lesson he believes the teens learned.

“I think that for a lot of them the theme that kept going around was, ‘I’m not going to complain anymore,’” he said. “That, and judging the poor. People think that if someone’s poor they’re not doing anything. These people in Mexico are working their butts off for $20 a week. These are people working so hard and they have so little.”

Contact Greg Johnson at greg.johnson@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.