I watched the roaring bulldozer demolish the last of my house. The last crunch snapped the final pieces and then they turned off the machine, and it fell silent. It had just hit me how different my life was going to be from then on. I was seven years old when my parents made the executive decision to tear down our old house and rebuild it from the ground up. Every part of our old house would be thrown away to make room for the new one. On the day that my house actually came down, my parents explained to my sisters and me that we would be doing almost all the work as a family to rebuild it. They really weren't kidding when they said that. The next three years were spent digging trenches and picking up trash around our property, not
