I agreed to team up with Robin and his friend Colin to build an earth bag house. They know how to build earth bag houses, and I know how to do rural community organizing, so that’s that.

Our trip to Parbat has given me lots to think about. I’ve decided on a new strategy: treat shelter construction like dental care. Assume people have almost everything they need except for encouragement and a few key items, and then use stuff as an incentive to organize and act. We’ll start by lending a hand to repurpose materials from damaged homes. At the same time we’ll do some sample building using earth bags, plastered bamboo, and whatever else we can come up with. Anyone who completes a shelter will get tin to cover it. Basically, it’s the reverse of the housing strategy being used by the government and large INGOs.

On Monday when we set out in Robin’s truck to look around in Archalbot, one of the villages where the Lamjung government has asked us to work. I’m happy to say that the same morning Robin brought his truck in for maintenance, and returned it outfitted with fresh tires and a new suspension. Perhaps it’s first suspension.

However, when we arrived in Archalbot in late afternoon, we saw that most people had already patched up their houses with bamboo and tin. Which was great, but it didn’t really leave much for us to do, since that was our own plan. Before leaving, we went to visit the Dalit part of the village, and found our way up to a collection of four families sharing tarps over beds they had outside.  Their hosues are standing, but dangerously cracked on the inside.  We got to talking and hit it off right away.

On the other hand, this is a tricky scene. We’re basically checking people out for an aid project, and they know it, so they’re checking us out too while trying to casually impress us with their cause. Everyone wants it to work out, but there’s a lot of suspicion on both sides. We don’t want to get pulled in to personal interests or hidden local politics; villagers want us to stick around, but only if we are going to do decent work. They’ve surely watched numerous groups come and go with false promises. Would it be crass to call it aid-dating? Probably. But accurate.

Our date went as well as a first date can. People gathered in the yard and asked a lot of questions. A young guy named Kripa especially took an interest and seemed ready to organize his friends to come to an earth bag building workshop. Soon we were all laughing and eating roasted corn.

We left in good spirits, but not before an eleven year old boy named Kushal demanded my phone number. He was so unapologetic that I gave it to him.

On our way down, we stopped at the shelter of a family whose unlivable house we’d passed earlier. Since there was no room to build on their own property until their house gets demolished, they were living in someone else’s empty rice paddy under a pileof repurposed tin, blankets and tarps. Sitting at the edge of the dark space inside, which was lower than my height, was a seventeen year old mother with her two month old baby. A listless looking elderly couple sat outside.

This family seemed to be the neglected poor of the neglected poor, minimally educated, an air of stasis lingering about. The task of getting from here to a rebuilt house on their property seemed inconceivable. Even our escorts – their neighbors – inadvertently gave off a vibe that this family was a hopeless case. I can’t blame them; it was hard to imagine what to do.

By the time we got back to Robin’s truck, we had a plan. Kripa would be our organizer. We’d work in Archalbot on three conditions: they clear a small corn field for building an earth bag house for the collection of Dalit families; Kripa recruits six to eight volunteers from around the village to learn the building technique; everyone takes a day in the middle of the training to build a bamboo house for the family in the field, and we’ll provide tin to cover it. In other words, we’ll leverage the earth bag building project to rally the community around this other family. And then if anyone else decides to build either kind of structure afterwards, we’ll give them tin too.

A group of kids got a huge kick out of clamboring up in to the back of the truck and riding it up the dirt road, bouncing and laughing until we turned off to head south on the highway.

We sped and rattled all the way back to Pokhara with a feeling of possibility. On the way, we stopped for a snack at a road side restaurant in the middle of nowhere, called the Cock Fight Restaurant, run by a Nepali guy who served as a contractor in Afghanistan for seven years, teaching US military how to disassemble and reassemble guns. He knew about every kind of gun imaginable. Well after it was dark he was still telling us about working with the US Military in Afghanistan, and about the actual cock fights that he holds at his restaurant, and about the goat farm and security businesses he runs now in Nepal, where he is quite wealthy.

Another mysterious day.

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