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For the children of construction workers and short-order cooks in the foothills south of Tijuana, opportunity begins with four free walls.

Larry Taylor discovered that odd bit of information on a father-daughter trip in January 2006 under Youth With a Mission’s Homes of Hope program.

He traveled to an area where public education is guaranteed through the sixth grade. Beyond that, children in the area continue their schooling only if their parents can afford to pay.

Most cannot; their meager incomes go toward putting some kind of a roof over their families. Forget a floor. Those are dirt; frequently the roof amounts to the undercarriage of an abandoned automobile.

Taylor returned in January 2007 and again last January, each time with a different daughter, to build homes for families so they can then use some of their income, which is typically in the $100-per-week range, for continued schooling.

“It’s either feed your family or send your kids to school,” said Grizelda Human, a Homes of Hope registrar.

Taylor made a second trip this year. Over the weekend of Nov. 7-9, he returned as president of Merchants Bonding Co. in Des Moines. He brought along 43 other people – the company’s executives and their families.

The trip took the place of Merchant Bonding’s annual executive retreat, typically a weekend of goal setting and golf.

“I decided that instead of doing that, we would do something to give back,” Taylor said.

He was looking for a special activity to celebrate the company’s 75th anniversary. He had to convince a somewhat skeptical board of directors that the trip would be worthwhile. Toward that end, Taylor made certain that there was a separate goal-setting session.

Merchants Bonding was founded in 1933 in Des Moines. It provides surety bonds, or guarantees, that public improvements promised by commercial developers get constructed. It is the largest surety bond company in Iowa and the 19th largest in the nation, with about 78 employees in Des Moines and 95 throughout the country.

Executives from the Des Moines office were joined on the trip to Tijuana by officers from Scottsdale, Ariz., and Austin, Texas.

Even in a down economy, Taylor said, commercial construction activity in Greater Des Moines has kept Merchants Bonding in a growth pattern.

And the company manages to keep employees over the long haul. Therese Wielage, vice president for marketing, said she has generated lots of 30-year-anniversary salutations in the five months she has been with the company. And at least 50 percent of the staff has been with Merchants Bonding for 15 years or more.

All of that suggests there wasn’t a need for a formal team-building exercise, and the trip to Mexico wasn’t planned as one.

“There was no structured team-building event,” Taylor said.

Taylor used his experiences to convince the board directors that building homes for poor people would be an uplifting and worthwhile exercise for his company.

“It was a leap of faith. But I said, ‘Trust me on this one,'” Taylor said. “I was so proud of our officers being so willing to do this.”

The Homes of Hope program traditionally attracts church groups wanting to make a mission trip. In recent years, it has drawn the attention of an increasing number of companies who view team-building and building homes for the poor in the same light.

“About 50 percent of the groups building our homes are companies and corporations,” Human said.

The population of the northern Baja California region of Mexico grows at the rate of about 5,000 people a month, according to the organization, with many trying to fight their way out of poverty by working in the booming Tijuana area.

For the poor, shelter consists of pallets and scrap lumber, possibly concrete blocks, maybe an old school bus.

The two families for whom Merchants Bonding built homes had average weekly incomes of between $110 and $120, not enough to support themselves and send their kids to school beyond the sixth grade.

“So think about what having one of those houses can do for someone’s opportunity,” Taylor said.

To qualify for homes, the local families must own the patch of ground where the home will be built and lack permanent shelter, at least one adult must be employed and the families must have at least two children.

Merchants Bonding tapped into the Homes of Hope deluxe package, agreeing to build two 16-by-20-foot homes and provide furniture, a refrigerator, propane-fired stove, a rug and electricity. The homes have a single divider inside and they lack plumbing.

The company paid $5,000 per home plus $200 for each person who went on the trip.

Workers split into two crews made up of adults, children and a three-person Homes of Hope crew that supervised the construction.

Concrete pads had cured and materials were on site when the Merchants Bonding crews arrived. The concrete pads alone are key to the health and well-being of the children, Taylor said.

The Merchants Bonding crews worked for two days, cutting lumber, painting, balancing sawhorses on hillsides; the children on each crew provided the painting labor.

At the end of the day, they would return to Tijuana and the comforts of a modern hotel, where some of the rooms were larger than the homes they were building.

Before leaving, the crews took up collections to buy other essentials for the families.

The experience provided officers and staff a chance to get to know one another a little better.

“You put a group of people together and they work together in an out-of-the-box situation,” Wielage said. “It’s a good team and they work very well together.”

Kirk Rathjen, assistant vice president for contract underwriting, said that in addition to watching co-workers labor in a different environment, he got to “cut boards with my daughter for an entire day.”

In fact, much of the benefit to company employees was the opportunity to watch the interaction of the children from different cultures.

“One of the things I took from the trip was a neighborhood boy named Jesus who spent a lot of time playing with the kids in our group,” said Michael Foster, executive vice president. “They just played; it really didn’t matter that he didn’t speak English and they didn’t speak Spanish.”

Wielage said the trip will help Merchants Bonding in its recruiting efforts, especially among young prospects who want to understand a company’s culture.

“This is the kind of leadership that we have here; this is the kind of culture we have,” Wielage said.