Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Habitat 2011 - Honduras

This year's Habitat trip brought me to Honduras in Central America. It is a little known country as I found out when I was trying to fundraise, but it has always been a destination for me as Ben, my first ever Habitat leader, raved about doing a Global Village trip there before.

It was my first "corporate build", which is when Habitat is working with a corporation rather than individual volunteers, and I was working with volunteers from the publishing company Reed Elsevier. Reed Elsevier is a huge organisation with over 30,000 employees worldwide, and each of my volunteers were "champions" of their local "RE Cares" community programme. It was very nice to be working with others who are all so committed to helping others, and each of them also were sympathetic with each other's efforts to make other people do more!

Honduras itself is one of the poorest countries in Latin America, and is still recovering from when Hurricane Mitch destroyed much of the country back in 1998, when 6,000 people died and more than 75,000 were made homeless. It is no surprise then that the focus of Habitat's work is to create hurricane and earthquake-proof homes in Honduras, and so far they have helped more than 10,000 families in the country.

We were building in a small mountain town Santa Rosa de Copan, their claim to fame as being the closest big town near to the Copan Ruins. It was a gorgeous little town with cobbled streets and not a lot going on. We were building for a single mother Mariela who has a little girl Sarahy; interesting to note that single mothers did not seem to have the same kind of stigma that they suffer elsewhere. With high unemployment, there is not much to entertain the youngsters of the town, to the extent that Habitat will be building a village especially for single mothers in another future project.

We were only in Santa Rosa for 5 days, as corporate builds tend to be a lot shorter, so unfortunately it did not progress as much as other builds I've been to in the past. We were also rained off for the first day! Luckily, the foundations had already been dug when we arrived:

Here is Mariela with little Sarahy. Her uncle Martin also spent most of the week with us, and he was her main helper on site. His English is non-existent, as is my Spanish, but oh did we get to know each other when we went salsa dancing on the last evening. That man has got good hips!


Our main jobs for the week were to create the "re-bar" steel reinforcements which make the house more earthquake proof, mix cement for the foundation, and start the block work for the external walls.



(and I post a rare picture of me actually doing some work! not many of these exist, ha!)


(I should take a leaf from Abbey's book...)

And by the last day, we got about a quarter up the house! It normally takes 3 months for the normal builders plus the family and helpers to build a house in Honduras, and with our help this will be reduced to 2 months, so we felt slightly better about ourselves.


Even after all these years working with Habitat, I still never fail to have a good cry during dedication. The team in Honduras should also be commended for giving us some of the most warm cultural welcome for our team. We were welcomed by some traditional dancing on our first day, and the last day's dedication had a live xylophone band (hijacked by myself and Liza after not so long, ha!). Much credit to young Johny who looked after us during the build, we couldn't have done it without you. (and also thanks to Rena who I stole all the photos from!)




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