Gazette-Times Reporter

This is a life-altering spring for Taylor Kavanaugh at many levels, and only a small part of it has to do with his role on the Oregon State football team.

The senior walk-on wide receiver is competing to be a backup in the fall, and trying to remain the punt returner with open auditions going on.

He finishes his construction engineering degree at the end of the spring term and will only need to take a few classes to remain eligible in the fall.

Then it's off into the real world, but he needed real-world experience.

And it found him.

Two weeks before spring practice Kavanaugh was training for football and going to school as usual when he noticed, in the engineering department newsletter, an opportunity to travel to Guatemala during spring break and volunteer to build a home for a needy family.

He attended a meeting for the trip in a snap decision. Since he was graduating in four years instead of the typical five-year plan for engineers, Kavanaugh had extra school money set aside to fund this expedition.

"It was something that interested me," Kavanaugh said. "I didn't know it was going to be as a rewarding experience as it ended up being. I knew it was something I wanted to experience. I hadn't done much traveling in my life, and now I plan on doing more now."

Kavanaugh quickly put the paperwork together, received a passport just in time and took his toughest winter term final early. He boarded a plane March 19 and set off to Antigua.

The first two days was an opportunity to get to know the eight other OSU students with him, sightsee, and visit Mayan ruins in Tecal.

There was a chance to study houses similar to the one they would build, survey the site, and meet the family they were helping.

"A lot of it was going with flow," Kavanaugh said. "I had sophomore year of Spanish in high school going for me, and there was no English down there. We stepped off the plane and went."

Then came the hard part - the seven-day build. There were local contractors as advisers but it was up the OSU students, with the help of volunteers from Brown, to figure it out and put the house together.

The advisers spoke no English, so it took time to translate construction terms.

Most of the OSU students had a background in building. Five were construction engineer majors, two engineering majors, one in forestry and one English major.

"He got a little bit of crap for that, but it was in good fun," Kavanaugh said of the English major. "We all wanted to help, and everybody was able to chip in and contribute a ton."

Materials arrived near the site away from town. With limited roads there the cinder blocks, cement and mortar were left at the bottom of a hill. The students carried them the last 60 yards up a hill to the construction site.

It wasn't difficult to make the house but it was physically exhausting. They bent rebar by hand, and cut it with a hacksaw. Cinder blocks were cut with machetes and concrete mixed by hand.

"Being a construction engineering student you have expectations of what construction looks like with all the technical aspects of it," Kavanaugh said. "I had to lower my standards, not in a quality sense, in the way they do things. We built a fairly good sized cinder block house with no power tools. It was a lot different than I was use to."

Students started out digging the foundation, and kept going until the house was done. The project went smoothly, with everyone satisfied.

They lived with area host families during the work week, and learned about local culture firsthand.

"The coolest part was every single day we are building this house for this family, and they are around," Kavanaugh said. "They have a bunch of little kids. They hung out and we played with them. They helped out. Little girls carried blocks up the path. That was nice to see. They were awesome people."

Kavanaugh left the trip a day early to be back by March 29 for a team meeting on the eve of spring practice. He missed a tour of a local volcano, but what he had done was worth it already.

During his 26 hour trip back home to Portland that featured 18 hours of layovers, he was able to reflect on what he accomplished.

"Coach (Mike) Riley says we have to live in a vacuum when we play football, and that's a great way to live," Kavanaugh said. "You are focused on the technical details and you can make steps every day on becoming a better football player, a better person. Then I realize when you go down there and do that, there are other things going on.

"It's unbelievable how these people live with so much less. And in some ways they live happier (than we do). It opens up your eyes and gives you another outlook on humanity. Now I can come back here and be positive toward what I have and the things I don't have."