INUVIK - Instead of lounging on the beach under the hot Dominican Republic sun, two Inuvik residents spent their tropical vacation helping a family in need.

Candace Seddon, a lawyer with legal aid, and Erica Wall, who works for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, took their holiday time to Aguas Negras, near Puerta Plata, where the pair hauled cement and lugged cinder blocks around in the blazing sun to build a home for a woman and her daughter.

This was the second trip for the two with the Servant's Heart Ministries, along with several other Canadians. Last year they also took their vacation time to build a home for a family of 12.

"Everyone always talks about the tropics, but hardly anyone looks past the beach," Wall said. "You can notice a lot of change from year to year and a lot of the community helped out this year and they're getting together to help each other."

Before Seddon and Wall and the other volunteers rebuilt the home, it was rotting, flooding and infested with cockroaches. They destroyed the old house and built a new one two feet above ground level with cinder blocks, not wood, to prevent those problems from returning.

"I volunteer hundreds of hours in this community (Inuvik) and I wanted to do something on a more global level," Seddon said. "And if you've done it once, how can you not do it again? You see the need and the difference that you can make."

During this trip, from March 27 to April 10, Seddon and Wall visited the family who received the home they helped build in 2010. The mother explained that in the new home, her children don't get sick now that they have a watertight home that's above the flood levels. The diseases and infections carried in the dirty water that gives name to the neighbourhood – Aquas Negras means black water in Spanish – no longer affects her children, allowing them to attend school.

The neighbourhood of Aquas Negras has about 1,000 families, with homes nestled between an industrial shipping cargo area and a power plant, and used to be a garbage dump. The community needs a lot of aid, in terms of shelter, education and medical conditions.

With that in mind, Seddon and Wall raised over $6,000, with the help of their Girl Guide troop in Inuvik and invested it back into the community. They purchased a water cooler and two maps for a school, tools for a local handy man, a new toilet for the neighbour of the family whose house they just built, bookshelves for a new medical clinic, a power inverter to provide lights for a school so English second-language classes can happen at night and a water supply for the medical clinic, as well as supplies.

In addition to supplies, they sponsored three children to attend the new school with money donated from Inuvik. The sponsorship pays the school fee, a uniform, a hot meal at lunch everyday, books and pencils for each student. They also purchased a notebook for each of the 150 students at the Cangrejo School.

"There's poverty there that's not even comparable to here in Canada," Seddon said. "I just always wanted to go and do good in the world, to do humanitarian work and then the opportunity came up."

Once Seddon and Wall have set a date and location, they will hold a community presentation to let people know about the trip and see photos of the area.

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