Skyline teams with club to give aid
The Utah State University Spanish Club is teaming up with Logan businesses to build houses in Mexico.
A group of students from the Spanish Club will be traveling to Sonora, Mexico next month to build straw bale houses, which are a waste product in the vicinity of Sonora, said Wendy Wasson, a first-year graduate student in speech language pathology and a member of the Spanish Club’s fund-raising committee.
Some of the more poverty-stricken citizens of Sonora live in cardboard houses with tar pitch roofs, which is detrimental to the human respiratory system, Wasson said.
She said houses cost $500 to build and use the straw bales as insulation. The Spanish Club plans to raise $10,000 for the trip through donations from businesses, she said.
Club Skyline will be sponsoring Noche Latina Jan. 12 and Jan. 26 to help in the fund-raising effort.
A father and son team, Lloyd and Bryan Jenson own Club Skyline. The dance club will donate $1 from admission prices on these Latin music nights to the Spanish Club, Bryan said.
“I’ve seen how people live in South America,” Bryan said, who returned from serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Chile in 1994. “There are a few that need help.”
Lloyd said members of the Spanish Club approached him and Bryan in December asking if they would like to participate in the fundraiser.
“It’s a win-win situation,” Lloyd said. “They will do some advertising for us and we will help them.”
Club Skyline is open from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. Wednesday through Saturday. Friday is the exception, which is high school night. The club is open from 8:30 to 11:30 p.m.
Wasson said Latin Night is one of the busiest nights at Skyline.
“Mostly Hispanics come now [on Latin Night], but we get a few gringos in there,” Lloyd said.
Wasson said instructors from the USU Ballroom Company will teach Latin dancing at Skyline on the fund-raising nights.
“We hope to pull more students from the university [to the lessons],” she said. “We’re trying to get some new faces there.”
The idea for the fundraiser came to the Spanish Club from a student who is working on her master’s thesis who happened to catch part of a National Public Radio broadcast, said Scott Larsen, president of the Spanish Club and a sophomore majoring in Spanish and pre-med biology.
Larsen said the road wasn’t an easy one because of some bureaucratic hoops the club had to jump through.
The club had to set up a special bank account and also gain insurance for the group of students to go to Mexico, Larsen said. Approximately 14 students will be traveling to Sonora, he said.
Larsen said this is his first time traveling to Mexico and a majority of the Spanish Club’s members leaving on the building trip haven’t been before either.
“It was scary for a while because people said it wouldn’t be possible,” Larsen said.
The Hispanic Engineering Association is the house-building organization working with the Spanish Club, Larsen said.
“[They] are really helping us out a lot,” he said.
Larsen said the Spanish Club’s goal of raising $10,000 is nearing realization. He said the club has raised $6,000 to $7,000 so far.
Wasson said some businesses that have donated money for the trip are Carmack’s Doughnuts, Logan Bakery/ PanderÃa Mexicana, JC Hunt Co. Inc., Power Quip, Ladies Fitness, Members of Cottonwood Hospital Radiology department and Maria Taqueria.
“Before the [Christmas] Break, we had raised $5,000,” she said. “We had a table playing Shakira’s music and we went Christmas caroling in Spanish. People seemed so delighted to see us.”
The club members will leave for Mexico Feb. 17 and return after eight days, according to a packet the club distributed to businesses, inviting them to participate.