The BYU Global Engineering Outreach Club's students and faculty volunteered to help build the foundation of a Navajo Nation community home in Aneth, Utah on Sept. 20-21.
Volunteers worked in conjunction with DesignBuildUTAH, a branch of the Master of Architecture program at the University of Utah. The program provides experience designing and constructing family homes to students and volunteers.
The most recent Navajo Nation project marks eight years since the club began volunteering to help resolve housing issues in the Navajo community.
For this year's project, BYU volunteers drove six hours to Aneth, Utah. They helped receive lumber materials donated by Big D Construction. Volunteers also helped prepare and pour concrete into the house's foundation.
"I spent most of the day just cutting open concrete bags, pouring them into buckets and then carrying them over to the mixer," Gunner Reay, a BYU junior studying mechanical engineering, said.
Reay said the Navajo community needs a safe and sustainable home, and he was glad he had the opportunity to serve the community members again. Reay also served in the Navajo Nation reservations during his missionary service for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the New Mexico Farmington Mission.
Hiroko Yamamoto, the co-director of DesignBuildUTAH, shared that donors, students and volunteers delivered more than 20 houses to families in the Navajo Nation over the past two decades through the program.
The house construction project for Herbert and Elsie Keams, Navajo community residents, started on Sept. 2 and is set to finish by Dec. 21. Yamamoto added that after the completion of the house, students hand the house key to the clients and celebrate their new home.
"Each time on the open house day, everyone cries. The clients cry, the students cry because we witnessed the much effort every moment," Yamamoto said.
She said Keams was one of the people who visited campus to seek help building a house, and he waited more than ten years to start working on this new home for his family.
Herbert Keams, longtime resident of Aneth, Utah, said he and his wife have been living in a house built with asbestos and lead-based paint since the 1970s. He moved between Arizona and Utah for schooling, met his wife Elsie and continued his marriage for 57 years in Aneth, where he worked as a safety specialist for oil companies.
Keams further explained that asbestos is a heat-resistant material that was popular for using to build houses for many years. However, the United States Environmental Protection Agency identified its material as a hazardous pollutant in March 1971.
The National Cancer Institute said evidence suggests that asbestos creates serious health problems in breathing or permanent lung damage if people breathe in its tiny fibers released in the air for a long time.
Yamamoto said that lack of housing is a common issue in Navajo reservations because of the lack of resources and the absence of construction companies or design firms to serve the community.
Although the budget is available, Yamamoto explained that families and individuals cannot hire construction workers because people do not want to stay in the community for small projects such as single house construction.
She said this situation allows architecture students at the University of Utah to come help while learning about the community and gaining hands-on experience in their academic field.
Reay said many individuals and families suffer from challenging living conditions on the reservation. He said he witnessed many from pre-existing conditions and a lack of medical resources during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Another challenge he mentioned is the contaminated water from metal poisoning in past mining projects. This, he said, is the primary issue of poor health among the people.
"I really, really love just to be here and to see it and to have the opportunity to interact with these people as much as possible because they're so amazing," Reay said.
Reay joined the Global Engineering Outreach Club in January 2024 and currently serves as the club's vice president over finance.
