Can we fix it? YES we can!

There's a photograph of me under a cardboard Bob the Builder, taken before I was old enough to keep the memory. I'm looking up at him like he'd just put me on the payroll.

He never asked whether a thing was broken past saving. He asked whether it could be fixed. And the answer came back plural.

YES, we can.

Hired on the spot by Bob, 2002.

I had the pronoun years before I had the spelling.

The list took longer.

Saturdays turned into Home Depot: my mother, my sister, me. Nobody was there to wander. Duplexes needed work and my mother wasn't going to pay a stranger to do it, so she brought her two girls and a list.

Here's what I didn't understand at the time. She never sat us down and explained what mattered to her. She just kept handing us a list. That's the standard — the one you model, not the one you announce.

It never felt like a chore. Concrete underfoot, orange aprons, bins of fasteners sorted by length because someone decided two inches and three inches deserved separate systems. I wanted to know how all of it worked.

Order of operations: paint is last.

First the footing, then the framing, then the drab structural work nobody photographs.

Now the part I'd rather leave out. Some of you have watched me leave it out.

I spent most of my adult life filing all of it under "childhood." A warm story instead of a mission, which is a strange call to make, because nothing about those mornings was sentimental. Several families lived in the homes we were patching.

Hobby, I called it. Convenient word. Hobbies don't come with a standard you can fail.

That word is gone.

I'm asking you because you know me. Which means you've seen the gap between what I said mattered and what I actually gave my Saturdays to. That gap is the mirror. I'm closing it.

Here's where it's headed. I've never set foot in Sullumayo or Huaro in Peru, and I won't describe South American ground I haven't stood on.

Virgen del Rosario sits high in the Andes. Teachers make a three-hour trip from Cusco, then bunk on campus all week. Nothing heats the building. No water runs. The bathrooms don't work. Sky shows through part of the roof.

Drop my mother in that room and a list starts.

The Quispicanchi Project's Building Together Campaign is closing that roof: plumbing, ceilings, insulation, a kitchen, and a room so one more teacher gets a bed.

More than twenty years later, I'm still patching somewhere a person has to sleep.

Huaro is five minutes down the road, and C.E.B.E. San Antonio is the only school of its kind anywhere in the region — fifty families raising children with special needs, in a building the 2024 earthquakes tore up, on land they lease from the public school that turned around and gave them notice.

They went and bought land. Nobody had promised to build on it yet.

That's the part I can't get past. Building with people over building at them. I've watched giving run the other direction most of my life: somebody flies in, unveils a plan, photographs the ribbon. Nobody flew in here. They were three moves ahead of all of us.

$40,000 total, split across two schools. A greenhouse somebody learns to run. Three hundred chickens a senior learns to keep. Classrooms. A feasibility study for the ground San Antonio already holds title to.

Very little of that is a building. It's mostly somebody getting the chance to find out how something works.

A student at Virgen del Rosario put it better than I can. "We're learning something real. This could help me start a small business one day. Or support my family."

That's aisle seven. Mine only cost a Saturday morning.

Grow what feeds you. Fix the room you're standing in. Then build something that outlasts you.

It goes back to my mother, my sister, and one Saturday morning. She raised two daughters on the premise that broken things get fixed.

Here's the rep, if you want one. Walk the building you're standing in. Find the repair everybody has quietly agreed to live with. Write it down.

I stopped seeing the rooms I walk through years ago. Sullumayo and Huaro stopped agreeing to live with theirs.

What are you still calling a hobby?

They were never waiting to be rescued. They were waiting for lumber.

I still know which aisle to go down. Walk down it with me?

YES, we can together.