Habitat for Humanity

Today, I went on a 3 hr bus ride to a small village to help out with Habitat for Humanity. What they do is partner with people who need homes and help them build it. The people in need can take out a subsidized loan through Habitat for Humanity for their house and pay it back in small chunks. They must also put in the required “sweat hours,” so many hours of physical labor on a house before they start on their own, on their own house, and on a house after theirs is finished. This way, they get help in creating a home, but they aren’t getting it for free either. Additionally, volunteers help with the construction so they can build it in a reasonable amount of time. We had a pretty large group today on the trip and were split into 4 groups of 10. My group was working at the foundation part of the house, digging up dirt to fill in the floor. It was hard work because the ground was almost the consistency of baked clay and riddled with large, dense rocks. That meant we had to use a pick-axe first to break up the ground before we could try shoveling any of it to dump it into the foundation. I think we made some fair progress, but it was hard to tell because the house was large and we were just dumping it in large squares so it didn’t actually look like we’d finished anything. We also didn’t have enough tools for everyone and only had one shovel that had a handle, so that also made the process take longer. I did quite a bit of all three jobs and fortunately managed to not get blisters (which I’m very grateful for because some of the other people did). We had interesting box lunches from the ship (salami, ham, cheese sandwich, hard boiled egg, chicken leg, orange, banana bread, oreos, drink – and ketchup for some reason?) that we tried to keep away from the stray dogs. Many of the houses have stray chickens and goats just roaming around which feels so unnatural to me but I guess is convenient for them. It was definitely a good experience, if nothing else than to have a better appreciation for hard labor. Also, the overseer told us that our entire group’s efforts were about a quarter of the house complete, so that was pretty cool.