I’m happy that the prime requirement for working with Hands On Disaster Response is a sense of humour because I think my construction skills leave much to be desired. So far I’ve acted as a diversion to keep a massive group of teenage girls away from the other volunteers who were attempting to build a house, pounded mud with a cricket bat in an attempt to repair a foundation, and been a gopher while the rest of the team worked on constructing the roof of a new school. So far I haven’t fallen off of anything and have only had one thing fall onto me. Pretty good going, I say. I’ve been doing some sawing, pounding, hammering, measuring, lifting and water fetching. All great skills for the resume.
On Saturday I’ll be joining four other people who will be building a ‘HODR Half’. The ‘HODR’ part stands for the organisation, ’Hands on Disaster Response’ and the ‘Half’ is a half a house. The idea with the half houses is that HODR will get a basic, sound structure up that can be expanded later by the homeowner if they want. So instead of having a pointy, triangle shaped roof, they’ve got a half roof that sort of slopes downwards making it easier to build an extension onto the front of it.
I really don’t know much about construction so I’m hoping the other team members don’t mind teaching me the way of the HODR Half. I’m pretty keen to work on a house from start to finish, even in a gopher, water-fetching capacity if need be. I think it’s about time I fall off a roof though, so hopefully I’ll be able to get more involved.
We’re just about to finish up a school that will replace a tarp that the students are currently working under. When they’re not in class they’re always hanging around the site which, with pointy things occasionally sliding off the roof, probably isn’t the safest. It’s handy having them around though because they’re eager to help and we’re happy to get them to pass us stuff and cart wood around. Yay to child labour.
The community members around the school have been taking turns making lunch for us and are always around to offer help, have a nap inside the structure, or to just stare at us. When we walked home the other day we had a trail of about 10 people lingering behind us for quite a while but everyone is really nice and it’s great to feel like the community is involved.
Leave a Reply