Habitat build 2010 - back to Kenya

This year's Habitat for Humanity saw me returning to Kenya, where I built in 2008. Even though I've been to all sorts of far flung places with Habitat now, East Africa does have a very special place in my heart, and I'm always looking froward to returning there.

Despite the fact that Kenya is probably one of the richest countries on the continent, levels of poverty remain dire, particularly in the countryside. This has not been helped by the civil unrest in 2008, when 800 people died and a further 600,000 were displaced. While peace has now been restored, and a new constitution ratified without further violence, the future still remains in the balance for most Kenyan citizens.

This year, we were building in the Maua region near Mount Kenya. This region is generally populated by the Meru tribe, and is particularly famous for the cultivation of 'miraa' or 'khat', a mild amphetamine that is legal in Kenya. It is the drug that is used to produce 'legal highs' in the UK, in particular mephedrone or MCAT or Meow Meow, which have now been outlawed following several cases of misuse. Nevertheless, chewing the branches of the miraa plant is the way of life, and builders all happily had little twigs hanging out of their mouths. It does taste rather rank, and you have to chew an awful lot to get any effect, so none of us really understood what the fuss was about. I'll stick with just a cuppa next time.

We built for two families. Julius and his wife Rosita had 10 children, and a growing tribe of grandchildren, and currently lived in a basic 2 room wooden house. We were helping them to build another wooden structure, as they had just received the first part of the loan from Habitat. This was a relatively straightforward house, with us helping to dig the foundations, mixing cement, the usual jazz.

The second house was a little more challenging. Mithika and his wife Helen had 6 kids, and made most of their living from growing miraa in their acre plot of land. Yes, we were building the house for the local drug baron! Mr M, as we liked to call him, had rather grand renovation plans for his existing 3 room wooden house. Apparently he wanted to cut off the bottom half, lift up the house, and then put the foundations in underneath. And somehow that was exactly what we did.

Here is the builder, sawing off the bottom half:

The house was literally floating in mid-air when he was finished, propped up with only wooden beams placed strategically around the sides. I was already panicking at the whole surrealness of the situation. Definitely the oddest house I've ever built:

I was used to Kenyan time, and the general relaxed way in which Kenyans do not really have a plan. But when you are building a house backwards, everything makes no sense. All the debris from inside the house had to be removed through the only door at the front, and there was so little of the original house left by the end. Even the wardrobe was floating at one point:

The idea of it all was to have a stronger house, with brick work complementing the existing wooden structure. It was pretty difficult to work in these conditions, absolute health and safety nightmare:

By the final day, we had finished adding the main block work, and also managed to give it all a fresh lick of paint. However, Kenya being Kenya, nothing is straightforward! Mr M went and got the paint, and came back with only yellow and green. Then he told us to start painting then promptly disappeared. The house started to look a bit Jamaican to be honest, and all the builders kept worrying us, telling us it should be blue. Hmmm... anyway, I thought it looked quite nice!

Aside from the work in Maua, we also visited an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp on the outskirts of Nairobi. This is a camp where some of the displaced people ended up after the events of 2008. Each displaced family were awarded funds by the government to try and rebuild their lives, and with the help of Habitat, 335 families are currently building a safe shelter to live in this new place. Unlike the traditional Habitat model, the families only pay sweat equity, acknowledging the fact that many of these families are female-led households without a steady income, but this also means that they are much more reliant on donations. Read more about it here. We spent only about 30 minutes in the camp, but seeing families still living in leaky tents left a profound effect on all of us.