International School Dhaka has been involved with Habitat for Humanity for a few years; each year students from the Secondary School go out to a site and work for a day, helping to build a house. Admittedly, we’re talking unskilled labour here, so they can’t be up there building walls or anything like that, but there’s still plenty to do that contributes and gives them the chance to see what life is like for many of the people in this country. I’d been interested in it ever since I heard about it, so I was excited when the news came up that it was that time of the year again.
So today it was the turn of my advisory, and off we went. It took us a couple of hours to get to the village, basically because the traffic was horrendous. Once we arrived we split the students into 3 groups of 11 and each group was taken off to a building site where they’d work for a couple of hours. For my group, we were here:
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As you can see on the right there, one of our jobs here was to move that great big pile of dirt they’re all admiring, using those baskets you see on the ground over the wall and into the space behind. This will later be tamped down and covered in concrete to create the floor.
The pile was a lot bigger when we arrived, by this point in the photo they’re all pretty knackered after working at this for probably about an hour. Shovelling is hard work anyway, even harder if you’ve never done it before.
Under the bamboo slats on the left hand side of the photo is a 16 foot hole from where they’re obtaining the dirt. The hole will eventually be lined with cement rings and be turned into a well. There’s another hole just to the left of the photo.
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Our other task here was to clean these bricks. They’re mossy and dirty after being stored for a while, and need cleaning otherwise the mortar won’t stick to them. The water was obtained from a tube well, the kids had to head over about 40-50 meters, pump the water into one of the small buckets by hand, carry it back and pour it into a large bucket, then get scrubbing. One kid told me he’d never scrubbed anything in his life, and I believe him, probably not even a dinner plate. Now THIS was boring work, really. The digging was W A Y more fun than this. But they generally got on with it, more or less in good spirits, and cleaned up a fair few bricks. A drop in the ocean, but worthwhile, and a big deal for them to get their hands dirty.
At lunchtime we all gathered back at the buses for lunch. Overkilling on the packaging, we’d been provided with sandwiches wrapped in clingfilm then packed in a large cardboard box, a packet of spicy nibble things, and a banana each. We had more than we needed, so after everyone had eaten once, instead of having seconds we decided to hand them out to the crowd of young children who’d gathered around us.
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The kids were interested in the food, especially the nibbles (come on – it was obviously artificial and something they almost never eat, in a big shiny red package, of course they wanted that more than half a white bread tuna sandwich!), but it turned out that what the women wanted, or one in particular, was our rubbish. After a bit of confusion trying to get the driver to ask her a question (no, we aren’t going to say no, she can have it anyway) we managed to find out that she wanted the rubbish because of all the cardboard in it. To make things? No, for fuel. It’s about 15°C at present, and people get really cold at night. So there you go, our rubbish which the kids were chucking away without a second thought, was like gold dust to this woman. She took everything – the lunchboxes, the cardboard boxes the lunchboxes had come in, and anything else we had that could be burnt.
Of course there was also the obligatory “Pick up your rubbish, don’t be such slobs, consider the things we talk about in school, etc etc etc” talk the students needed as they quite without any consideration whatsoever just dropped stuff on the ground wherever they’d finished eating. Or not finished eating – once we started the cleanup I was fishing out and eating half eaten sandwiches and packets of crisps they’d chucked away. (I know, I know, it’s a neurosis. I can’t abide seeing food thrown away, I really can’t, and ESPECIALLY not where we spent today. It’s enough of an ordeal eating lunch in the canteen at school and not losing it every day screaming at the entire school to finish the food on their plates. But in a place like where we spent today – you have to eat everything. It’s just disrespectful otherwise.)
Then it was back to work. We switched sites, so we’d have some variety and got to try the other tasks, which meant that instead of washing bricks and digging dirt, we got to break bricks and dig dirt.
Here’s the house we worked on in the afternoon:
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That’s the hole they worked at filling in. They were a bit sillier now, the fatigue from the unaccustomed physical labour was kicking in, and it was a more confined space here so less easy to really get into it, there were only 3 hammers for breaking bricks, 3 shovels/scoops for the dirt, and a bunch of baskets, so there was a fair amount of standing around which was unavoidable. But they got into it – breaking things is always fun
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So, why break bricks? If someone’s gone to the effort of making them, why break them? Well, they make them in places like this,
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we saw loads of these chimneys along the road. Apparently they can make one brick every 3-5 seconds, and they work 24 hours a day for 8 months. The other 4 months the whole area is under water. Thing is, there aren’t really any stones in Bangladesh, so if you need hardcore, gravel, or anything like that, which you do for building foundations, and concrete, you have to make it yourself. Take clay, make bricks, use some to build with, break others up as substitute stone. In large quantities. Everywhere you go there are people breaking bricks. So that’s what we did. I’m afraid we wouldn’t have been able to make a living from it, our contribution in the hour we were there wasn’t very large at all, maybe enough to fill a small bucket, but we do have plenty of conversation topics for when we’re back in school, and it means that when the kids look out of their car windows on their way anywhere, they’re going to be able to make a bit more of a connection with what they see around them on a daily basis. Assuming they look up from their PSP and do look out the window of the car.
Of course the usual crowd of kids clustered around to watch us, and as always I got a kick out of taking their pictures and showing it to them on the digital camera. They loved posing:
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and when we saw how good they were at tree climbing they had fun posing up the tree too:
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Then back on the bus and back to school. Completely knackered. A good day had by all, methinks.
