On the first day, we gather in an enormous tent for an opening ceremony: dancers, drummers, blessings and the auspicious lighting of a torch with multiple flames. The future homeowners, gorgeous in many-hued saris, greet each of us volunteers, marking our foreheads with brilliant red tiklas to welcome us and looping garlands of chrysanthemums around our necks. Honored guests include Fatima Bee Shah, the owner of the first Indian Habitat house, built 23 years before. Wearing sneakers, a T-shirt and dungarees, and quite fresh for an 83-year-old, Jimmy Carter takes center stage to address us. "It's a human right to have a place to sleep," he says. And that's exactly what we set out to create. Early the next morning, vans shuttle us to the work site for breakfast. A Habitat advance team has already prepped the site for the neighborhood, laying out the grid of lanes--leaving space for small craft industries, a clinic, a school, a community hall and a few shops--and installing storm sewers. With just 320 square feet per side, nobody can call the duplex houses we're building lavish. But their concrete walls, steel windows and doors, tile-covered roofs, water, toilets and electricity will make them incomparably better than what many Indians call home. For each duplex, the advance team poured a concrete pad, laid the first course of block and built the tricky sections containing water and electric lines. Now we volunteers and the owners will have five days to raise the walls and roofs, splash on some paint, and install the windows and doors. The teams meet at their houses; my team is lead by a New York contractor, Tom, and his wife Nancy. On the stoop of our house, Dalvi lights incense and draws geometric patterns of colored chalk to invoke good fortune, while Tom gives us a briefing. He stresses safety, hydration, the buddy system, and attention to quality and finish. "Just imagine this is your own house," he says. We choose a team name, Asha, meaning "hope." Then Dalvi asks Tom to smash a coconut, which signifies ego-the breaking of it symbolizes that we'll shed our egos while we work. We all hold hands, and Nancy offers up a simple dedication that ends with a rousing cheer of "Asha!" After a masonry demonstration, we get down to work. I am not a handy person; jobs I undertake that require tools and physical effort usually end in a mess. But laying block is elementary enough, and satisfying. I find it to be an engrossing pleasure. The next time I look out across the site, the entire place is a hive of activity. |
EVERY YEAR JIMMY CARTER HAS A BLOCK PARTY. AS IN CONCRETE BUILDING BLOCKS. JONATHAN LERNER JOINED THE FORMER PRESIDENT IN INDIA AND LEARNED, AS A HABITAT FOR HUMANITY VOLUNTEER, THAT BUILDING HOUSES BUILDS HOPE. |
IT'S A HOT DAY in Lonavala, in western India, and I'm mortaring blocks into place, a skill I learned just this morning. Now, at day's end, the volunteers with whom I'm building a house are tidying up. |
I LOOK OVER TO SEE THE FUTURE OWNER, Nandabai Daulat Dalvi, sweeping with a twig broom, her bright orange sari skimming the concrete floor. It occurs to me that she might repeat this task 10,000 times in the coming years, and that there's little pleasure in sweeping--except when you live in India and the floor belongs to you. Typical homes in this small town on the road between Mumbai (Bombay) and Pune have just a room or two, with bare earth floors. They're dark and hot--made of mud, wattle and stones--like the ones Dalvi's family and her future next-door neighbor Kusum Vijay Dhage live in. Worse yet is the inconvenience of no running water. With no bathrooms, villagers in some areas use the fields, and women have to start their day at 4 a.m. for privacy. Coming from the United States, where most everyone enjoys solid walls, roofs and running water, I find the lack of infrastructure, to say the least, sobering. Unlike the tourists who visit hilly Lonavala for its lush greenery, ponds and waterfalls, I'm here for a week volunteering with Habitat for Humanity's Jimmy Carter Work Project. Since 1983, the former president and his wife, Rosalynn, have led Habitat's international brigade. This year's project has attracted 1,700 people from around the word to build 100 houses, which will belong to members of Abhinav Cooperative Credit Society, a women's self-help group. What difference can 100 new houses make when 300 million Indians lack adequate shelter? A big difference to the Dalvi and Dhage families, and to the 49,900 other families that Habitat plans to help by 2010. And I'm excited to get my hands in the dirt. |
Many volunteers have participated in previous Habitat builds. They joke about having contracted "Habititis," a craving for the good feeling that comes from "giving someone something they've dreamt of their whole lives." |
Among the two dozen volunteers in my group are Bhagyam and Deepak--she a flight attendant, he an engineer. Both of them live in Lonavala. Marianne is a mom and social activist from New Jersey. Peter is a Canadian banker living in Delhi. Pierre, an Australian of Egyptian heritage working for a global bank in Singapore, arrives with a contingent of co-workers. Rudra is a Delhi-based executive of a multinational corporation. Others are from Korea, Japan, the United States and India, including several students from a nearby university that is a wellspring of 200 volunteers for the whole project. Though English is the dominant tongue, we speak many languages, meaning not everyone can communicate in words. And when you can't talk, you have to pay mighty sharp attention when handing a concrete block to somebody on a ladder above your head. But lack of language doesn't prevent us from doing the work, a heartening revelation. Like Marianne, Tom and Nancy, many volunteers have participated in previous Habitat builds. They joke about having contracted "Habititis," a craving for the good feeling that comes from "giving someone something they've dreamt of their whole lives," as Rick from New Hampshire puts it. Some, like Mike, an Armenian- American from New York who volunteered on several builds in Armenia, and John, an Indian-American from California, feel extra gratification doing this work in the countries from which their forebears emigrated to the United States. But many others are first-timers, coming as individuals or with groups from workplaces or churches. These include 100 U.S. Marines en route to deployment in the Persian Gulf; three strapping, turbaned lads from New Mexico who grew up in a Sikh community established in the 1960s by their American parents, converts to that Indian religion; and Rudra, who had never heard of Habitat until a week ago when an e-mail circulated in his firm. Busy with career and family, he says, "Invariably one's good intention gets limited to financial contribution. But this is an opportunity to do something material. One hundred houses don't make a big dent. But think of the awareness it will create, if it causes even 10 more to think like me." The days unspool: a van ride at dawn, breakfast, work, lunch, more work. Midafternoon, drummers and dancers parade up and down the lanes, leading a catering team that hands out cups of spicy, milky chai masala. More work, then dinner accompanied by presentations of traditional song and dance, and once a stunning display of acrobatic yoga. Then another van ride in the dark, a shower and a collapse into bed. By the end of that first day, 10 courses of block have gone up, and the window frames have been set in place. By the end of the second, the walls are up to the roofline, we've made a start on the gable ends, there is bright paint on the doors and window frames, and Dalvi and Dhage, with their bundles of twigs, are sweeping again. That evening, our student members return to their campus, so we have our first teary farewell, with the snapping of dozens of photos. I'm usually no better at climbing ladders than I am at building things. So on the following afternoon, I'm surprised to find myself eagerly clambering up a rickety scaffold to help lay the top courses of block on what will be the common wall between Dalvi and Dhage's sides of the duplex. What has happened to my fear of heights? I guess this task just needs attention, and my hesitation can't stand up to the strength and supportive atmosphere of such a collaborative effort. I'm still up there when the last two blocks are set. Dalvi and Dhage, who will each make "mortgage" payments of about 630 rupees (US$14.27) a month, climb up to place them: another ceremonial moment, with more snapshots. In most of them I'm honored to be accidentally the representative volunteer, silhouetted against the sky alongside the proud new homeowners. Later, when I see her sweeping, I badly want to say something to Dalvi. I call Deepak, who can translate my English into her Marathi. "What do you want to tell her?" he asks. All I can think of is one simple, maybe simpleminded, sentence: "Tell her, 'This is your beautiful house.'" Deepak translates, and Dalvi replies. "She says, 'Thank you.'" The part I don't need him to translate is her smile. Published in DELTA SKY, May 2007 |
