My second week in Nepal has been dedicated to leading a team
of mostly Australian volunteers who converged on Kathmandu last Saturday in
readiness for a week of house-building with two vulnerable families in a rural
village of the Kavre region. Twenty two people in total had signed up through
the Habitat for Humanity Australia Global Village (GV) program and have since
been donating and fundraising to support families who lost their homes during
the 2015 Nepal earthquake. We are here
to ‘build back safer’ and to learn first-hand the way that HFH Nepal works with
communities like this through volunteer engagement, as well as to learn about
the broader earthquake recovery program being managed by HFH Nepal.
An extraordinarily lovely, good-natured and good humoured
group of people, we spent the first Sunday in Kathmandu to visit an inspiring NGO
called ‘Seven Women’ which was established by an Australian woman to support local Nepali women to gain income-generating skills and empowerment. Starting with seven, literally thousands of
women have now benefitted from training, and the organisation maintains its viability also by
selling their creations locally and exporting to Australia for sale.
Each young woman has their own story of social exclusion
from within their communities, often as punishment for wanting more from life
than to be forced to marry very young and create a family. The women commonly send money they are able to earn through Seven Women's training back to their
families but in many cases are not permitted to physically return to their communities. The women that accompanied our team have however developed into natural leaders
under the tutelage of Seven Women and us volunteers had the immense privilege
of hearing their individual stories while learning from them how to cook traditional
Nepalese cuisine. It was a great way to
start the week!
On Sunday evening we travelled to Kavre about 90 mins north
of Kathmandu to spend the next week building homes. Housing in the very rural community where we
were heading was damaged extensively during the earthquake and HFH Nepal are
engaged in a recovery program, also with assistance from the Nepalese
government, aimed at rebuilding housing to be resistant to future earthquakes
and thereby will leave a more resilient community behind.
The working spirit of the volunteers as well as the families
was something to behold and we combined efforts with 3 other GV teams from the
USA and Japan also. The community was a
veritable hive of activity all week while people from all over the world built
alongside the community in solidarity. The selected families for our two house
builds are: an elderly single woman whose children live in other houses
adjacent to this site so we are building a single room space for her to sleep; while
the other family is a group of seven, including a husband and wife, his father
and their 4 teenage children. The boys
and girls of the family were extremely hard workers, bringing bricks from across
the site with scarves fashioned to balance on their foreheads as though they
were bringing a potato harvest back from the farm.
The team became expert bricklayers during the course of the
week and also became very efficient mixing concrete and mortar by hand. Their persistence was unwavering.
On the Wednesday we were compelled not to work due to the
Festival of Colours which is a national Hindu celebration which involves water
fighting and spreading of colourful powder all over your body. It was a happy coincidence that this trip fell
on this crazy week of celebrations for Nepalese people and we took the
opportunity to travel to Bakhtapur, a town which has numerous UNESCO world
heritage listed squares and temples, to immerse ourselves in colour along with
the locals.
Work concluded on Friday with the volunteers managing to
complete their allocated tasks for the week building the two homes up to the
base of the window along with internal dividing walls. The houses will be completed over the next
week or two by local contractors and the families.
An emotional farewell from the community after dedications/ribbon-cutting
ceremonies was followed by a visit to a model village called Pipaltar which has
seen the completion of 87 very high quality homes funded purely by HFH Nepal
without government assistance immediately following the 2015 earthquake. 180 to 200 local community members built
every day under HFH Nepal’s management, using destroyed housing rubble to
create improved roads and accesses. HFH
Nepal trained local masons through the construction process so the community
now has essential construction skills on hand for ongoing maintenance and new
housing that continues to be delivered by families themselves as their community
grows.
Back at the Hotel HFH Nepal put on a big farewell party for
the Australian volunteers as well as the Americans and Japanese which was a
great opportunity to let our hair down and share a fitting finale to the week’s
activities.
There is a quiet but profound dignity in the people of this community where we worked...
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