Louis dreams of being given a $5 million grant; then he could run his program off the interest. (Staff salaries, building materials and equipment rental, the mortgage on the students' residence in Bluff, transportation expenses and the like come to about $250,000 a year.) He likes building on the reservation because it is far enough away that the students can't go home every time they get a cold, he says. Also, he adds, on the reservation you can try new techniques without being hassled by building inspectors.

Louis would like to develop several prototype homes so that sustainable houses might someday be seen all over the reservation. As it is now, he says, every year they make one family happy and 500 others jealous. Drop by the Brian and Rebecca Johnson house, the second home built by the U. students on the reservation, and you'll see that no one ever moved into it. The house is not hooked up to the electricity the family was promised, which may be why they haven't moved in, says DesignBuild spokeswoman Karena Rogers. (The Deseret Morning News was unable to contact the Johnsons.)

Architecture student Lindsay Holloman says it is not easy to decide who gets a home. Last fall she and her fellow design/build students came to the reservation and interviewed families. Holloman says, "It was kind of sad. Everyone had a need."

McComb says his group chose Joe, the first person to get one of their homes, because she was a single mother who worked two jobs and was "deserving," he says. But over the years, working on the reservation, he's come to think everyone is equally deserving.

McComb says the houses are gifts, yes, but there are strings attached. For one thing, solar panels and other technologies may be impossible for the homes' recipients to maintain. Also, he notes, not everyone shares the students' sense of aesthetics. "We do these funky, whacked out, experimental things."

McComb figures some people see the exposed pipes, rusted steel, or an unrooted roof and say they'd rather have the pre-fab house the federal government provides. Of course, the Benallys say they'd been on a waiting list for government housing for more than 30 years when they were selected for a DesignBuild house.

As it turns out, Dora Benally also works two jobs, but if you can catch her on a break at her day job at the Recapture Lodge, she'll sit for a second and talk about the application process. She knew she was a finalist for a home, she says, but she didn't know she'd been chosen until all 10 students drove down from Salt Lake and surprised her at work.

She cried when they told her she'd won, she says. When she called her kids, they didn't believe it. She told them to look it up on the Internet. Soon her city-dwelling children were in the habit of checking the U. students' blog, watching as their parents' house got built.

If pressed, Dora Benally will say there is something she will miss about her old house. It has only two rooms, so when she is in one room and she can't find something, she knows it has to be in the other room. With this huge new house, she says, she'll have a harder time finding stuff.

But she knows she is going to love living in the new place. And so will her husband, she says. Baxter recently told her he couldn't believe he'd lived his entire life without running water and that he was about to get it, now, when he is 60 years old.

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E-mail: susan@desnews.com