Nepal housing project
The woven bamboo wall panels on a bamboo frame are being finished with cement plaster. Photo: Supplied
Spending a week building a low-cost house in Nepal isn’t your usual holiday activity, but basket-maker Peter Greer of Onekaka and retired farmer Robin Manson from East Takaka recently did just that.
They joined 30 other people from Nelson, 150 in total from New Zealand, who travelled to Nepal in October to build 42 houses in one week. The Everest Build project at Pokhara, 200km west of the capital Kathmandu, was organised by Habitat for Humanity (HFH), which recently celebrated the construction of its 5,000th house in Nepal.
Peter Greer said that as a qualified builder, he was made “house leader” of his team. “There were 14 people assigned to every house, and though my crew were all American, eight nationalities were represented on the 460-strong workforce. The house frames were already erected and our job was to weave bamboo wall panels and plaster over them to make solid walls. With such a big team it all happened pretty quickly. It felt like we were weaving a gigantic basket.”
Robin Manson, a mild asthmatic, soon found himself unwell and in need of a brief visit to the hospital for medication, but his illness only kept him off the project for one day.
“I thought maybe they’d have us Nelsonians all working together but they split us all up. I ended up in a group of Americans. In the end I realised it was as much about different nationalities working together as it was about building houses. It was a very rich experience.”
Although HFH operates in many countries, Nepal has been a favorite destination for volunteers from New Zealand. Workers from Australia, Canada, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Canada, Germany and USA also worked on the October Everest Build.
The Habitat houses built at Pokhara measured approximately ??? square metres and were made of woven bamboo wall panels on a bamboo frame finished with cement plaster. Roofs are galvanized iron sheets, although a bamboo composite sheeting is being developed that could be locally sourced and which is more environmentally sustainable.
HFH Nepal works with various partners ranging from bilateral aid agencies to non-government organisations and village banks. Each home partner family contributes “sweat equity” (their own labour) toward building their house as well as those of others. Families can also provide raw materials to reduce the loan they have to repay. Typically, the mortgage loan repayment period is less than three years and repayment averages US$7 per month.
According to Nepalese government figures, around 9.5 million or 41 per cent of Nepal’s population live in less than adequate housing. In Nepal that frequently means structures with thatched roofs and straw walls, sometimes supported by pillars made of bamboo or old timber. Water is often unsanitary and few dwellings have toilets or electricity. These dilapidated and tinder-dry houses are also a fire risk; nearly 10,000 families lose their homes to fire every year. Thousands of others lose houses to landslides, floods and other natural disasters.
The concept for HFH was born in the 1960s at Koinonia Farm, a small interracial Christian Community in Georgia, USA, which was founded by farmer and biblical scholar Clarence Jordan. Today HFH International has built 350,000 homes sheltering 1.75m people in 3,000 communities worldwide. It built its first house in NZ in 1993, at Pukekohe, after a report by consultancy firm Demographia International found that this country has one of the most severely unaffordable housing markets in the developing world. It still organises around 10 builds here a year. Loans for home upgrades are also available.
Says Peter Greer of his Nepal experience: “I was a little ambivalent about the merits of volunteer tourism and the enormous cost to build a few houses, but in the end it was a fantastic experience and I left feeling we had made a worthwhile contribution.”
Robin Manson explains that the cost of the trip included a $1000 donation towards building costs. “You could argue that you may as well give them a donation and stay home; however you could never get the incredible experience that it was, and that was invaluable.
“It’ll stay with me for life.”
Gerard Hindmarsh
