Home for the Holidays

                                          From left to right: Angie (13), Adriana (20), Raul,
                                          Adelina, and Gemma (24)

The Cendejas family got their new home just in time for Christmas, but the gifts didn’t stop there. Adelina Cendejas answered the door early Christmas morning eight years ago to a young man. 

“I recognized him because I saw him all the time on the construction site,” Adelina Cendejas recalled. “He said, ‘I brought you a gift you’re never going to forget.’”

Adelina and Raul moved to the United States to give their daughters, Gemma, 24, Adriana, 20, and Angie, 13, a better life. A family of five, the Cendejas family have been living in a one bedroom, one bathroom apartment for 13 years. 

Their old apartment building had a lawn big enough to play in. But the landlord wouldn’t allow it. 

“He wouldn’t let us play with balls, scooters, roller blades. He would ban everything,” Adriana said. “If he caught you doing one of those things, after three warnings, you would have to be out.” 

The Cendejas sisters said they recall him turning on sprinklers and shutting off the lights in order to get the children to go inside.

“There were a lot of kids our age and he would get mad. He would turn on the sprinklers on purpose.”

The Cendejas family remembers struggling with parking and scrounging for loose change just to be able to wash their clothes. 

Their living situation was made more difficult by the fact that they just couldn’t save enough to move out. 

“We tried to get a mobile home twice. We couldn’t afford it,” Adelina said.

The Cendejas family heard about Habitat for Humanity through some family members in LA who  own Habitat homes. They decided to check it out for themselves. 

They submitted an application not once, but three times. But once they got approved for a home, the process was a blur, with construction taking a record three months to complete.

“It was crazy. The process went by really fast. People would go and work on it everyday, especially on the weekends,” Gemma said.

And the photographer captured every single moment. 

“We were so excited we didn’t even think about taking pictures,” Adriana said. “He took pictures of a whole lot of things. And then he put them all on one album. Which was nice because there was literally nothing, there was just dirt and then little by little it was changing. So that was a really nice gift.”