Tag Archives: Archalbot

Around Town, Nepal Life, Oral Health Care Project, Work

Memorable Trips

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It has been six months since our post-earthquake housing projects in Archalbot and Bharte. We’re launching dental programs in or near these areas in 2016, so today Aamod needed to visit the Lamjung District government offices in Beshishar to get signatures that are required complete agreements in our new sites.  Yes, this sort of thing must be done in person in Nepal, not by fax or email or any other method, so Aamod has to travel 3 hours from Pokhara to Besishahar to get the signatures.  We decided that Dilmaya and I would accompany him to Lamjung and get out a few kilometers before Besishahar to visit The Bamboo Village in Archalbot. We wanted to see how everyone was were doing, and we also had to decide what to do about the earth bag house that didn’t get finished over the summer.

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Three good looking people suffed in to two front seats in a van to Lamung

We decided to go with local transportation.

There is a fuel shortage right now due to strikes along the Indian border, so prices for gas have skyrocketed, and most regular people are getting their cooking fuel on the black market. Transport has compensated by raising prices, by running fewer buses and taxis, and, obviously, by stuffing even more people in to the same number of car seats.

I took tons of photos last summer when Archalbot was building, so today we brought prints to give back people. I highly recommend this practice – it’s always much appreciated because until cell phones, most people had very few photos of themselves. Even now, sorting photos is always An Event. Older people will people examine each thing in the photo in great detail – the buffalo, the way their sari is tussled, the water pot in the background – and will ask questions like, “Only one of my sons is in this photo. Where is the other one?”

The first house we arrived at belongs to one of the last houses we helped with.  Last June there were about ten people with a few babies living in the tiny house hidden behind the clothes line.  Now they are still living in their new house and it looks great.

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While we were talking with this family, people from Archalbot started to notice us and come shouting excitedly down the road.  Remember Uttam’s sister in law, and the day she and her husband left to go cut bamboo after much cajoling?  She came bouncing down the hill shouting out to Dilmaya and me.

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The next house we came to was Uttam’s family – I admit this house is tied with the Golden Cottage for my favorite of all 150+ houses we helped with after the earthquake. I was thrilled to discover that, while living in the shelter they built last summer, Uttam and his brothers rebuilt houses on their own land. Just four days before we arrived, they had relocated the tin roof we provided on to their new stone house, which has yet to be completed and plastered. What a fantastic example of everyone pitching in the thing they have, and of the dignified resiliency that is so characteristic of Nepali people.

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July 2015

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June 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Uttam's family recently moved their shelter tin on to this new permanent house.

Jan 2016 – Uttam’s family recently moved their shelter tin on to this new permanent house.

Uttam’s older brother had also rebuilt his house – so the whole complex has moved back on to the family’s land in six months time. I was really pleased to see that the older brother’s new house is made from plastered bamboo chim – the same building style we pressed people to use when we provided roofs for the original shelters. This house is actually cheaper and far more earthquake resistant than a heavy stone house (you can see Uttam’s stone house in the background).

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We spent a lot of time giving people photos of themselves. This activity produced too many great moments to choose from!

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Overall, the houses that we helped people build in Archalbot look good. In a few cases, people are living in them full-time. In many, they are sleeping in their bamboo shelters while cooking and storing belongings in their damaged houses. In a few, the shelters remain but aren’t being used, either because the family has relocated altogether or just decided not to actually stay in it. Kripa’s family used their tin to rebuild the buffalo shelter where we glamped.

Glamping, June 2015

Buffalo & Goat Hotel, Jan 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The earthbag house is an interesting story. Our role here was as facilitator – my friend Robin had training and materials to build one earthbag home, and we provided a connection with a community that needed a house. I documented this process last summer right up to the point we had to put the building on hold for the monsoon, with promises to return this winter.

Well here we are this winter. The family with the half-earthbag, half-bamboo house has built a pretty impressive collection of houses out of it and they are living there full time.

There are many things I have to say about the earthbag house, so I’ll write about that separately. One of the things we had to figure out on this visit was whether or not we had enough manpower in Archalbot to call Robin back with tools and supplies to finish the house….and the answer was no. So this earthbag/bamboo house will stay as it is, which is a bit frustrating, but that’s that.

After tea and snacks back at our HQ in Kripa’s house, Dilmaya and I left Archalbot and walked back down to Bote Orar. We crossed the bridge that has replaced the one with a loose cable that held us up in the muddy road with a ton of corrugated tin for an hour and a half last summer. We got ourselves some knockoff Redbull in homage to the gallons of knockoff Redbull that kept us going during those hot months.

Aamod came reeling down the road from Besishahar and we clambored in to another crowded, swervy van. As the day became later we and switched to a bus in Dhumre, we settled in for the last two hours of our journey.

Yes, this is where it happens.  The inevitable road travel story.

As it turned out, somewhere up the road people were striking because an accident had struck someone in the road yesterday. There was a blockade that went for miles.

When we reached the blockade it was already dark out.  Our choices were to either wait it out until some undetermined time in the bus, or to start walking.  So we got out of the bus and set out past the endless line of stopped vehicles, some with people in them waiting for the 100% unpredictable hour or day that the blockade would be opened. The highway wound its way alternately through small towns and the middle of nowhere. We were still over an hour’s car ride from Pokhara.

There were still motorbikes coming by, so we made a plan to divide up.  Dilmaya and I hopped on the back of the first bike that could fit both of us, and rode it up to the mouth of the traffic jam. We waited there until Aamod caught up behind us half an hour later on another bike, and then we walked the last half mile or so to where people where crowded around the usual tires and logs blocking the road.  Behind the blockage was a group of women was sitting in on the pavement, not talking much. Some were fiddling on their phones. It occurred to me that they had probably just lost a family member or close community member on this stretch of road just 24 hours earlier – a strange contrast to the miles and miles of hassle that stretched out from either side of their circle.

Now we started past cars lined up in the opposite direction. Just to be clear: we were not a walkable distance from home.  Even by Nepali standards.

All of a sudden a jeep began rolling out past the innermost barriers of the blockade, headed in the direction we needed to go.  I turned around and saw it was an ambulance.

We sprung in to action. Aamod stopped the jeep and spoke with the driver who, understandably, told us that he could not let us hitch a ride in an ambulance. Aamod got on the phone with his brother in law, who is a doctor, and I stalled by keeping one arm in the rolled down window of the ambulance and talking to the drivers in Nepali.

“Sir, what ever shall we do? It’s quite cold out. We can’t possibly sleep here in the road.”

“I don’t know what to tell you- I’m not allowed to take people in an ambulance.”

“I see I see, but this is an unusual circumstance….” Etc.

I keep at this until Aamod has his brother in law on the phone, which he hands to the ambulance driver. Who then opens the back of the ambulance – and in we go.

And thus our day ends with us bouncing along in the back of this ambulance back to Pokhara. At one point, we drive through a checkpoint, and I lie down with my arm over my face, feeling slightly guilty, while Dilmaya sits next to me looking concerned and wearing a surgical mask that she has with her for general dusty road travel purposes. We roll through the checkpoint.

“Can I get up now?”

“Lie down! Not yet.”

It’s 9pm when we get to Pokhara; the ambulance driver amicably drops me off within walking distance from our office.

As Dilmaya, who was my partner in crime for the entire two-month adventure of our post-earthquake housing extravaganza, said: “Laura miss, our road trips are always very memorable.”

Oh, and one other thing – remember how the point of this trip was that Aamod was going to get papers signed by the district officials in Besishahar?

Yeah, well, there was some kind of meeting today and all the government employees were out of the office. So we have to go back to Besishahar for the signatures again.

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The early morning road from Pokhara to Besishahar

 

Earthquake, Nepal Life, Work

A Bamboo Village

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I am so excited about this post. I started hoping I’d get to write that title a few weeks ago, and now here it is.

We went back to Archalbot today to see how things had progressed since our tin delivery about a week ago. In contrast to our first shelter outreach effort, where we left not knowing how many heads we’d actually covered, in Archalbot we found a village of new bamboo houses. Some of them are still in progress, for a few reasons. One is that the houses in Archalbot didn’t fall completely; most people still have homes that are dangerous, but not technically unlivable, which slows down the shelter construction. The second is that it’s planting season, so people kind of got something up as quick as they could, and plan to do their plastering and finishing in about a month.

Still…this was a pretty great sight to see. Let’s start with the earthbag house. It’s been covered in a bamboo frame and turned in to a pretty sweet little cottage with electricity and everything hooked up, and a neighboring home built right next to it, much like the attached houses they are temporarily replacing.

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Next up, remember Kushal? Here is a photo from the tour he gave me of his original house, and here he is in his new bamboo home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The site we glamped at in Kripa’s yard, which was previously the buffalo shed, is now a bamboo outdoor hotel (which unfortunately, I seem not to have taken photo of!) And this lady, Kripa’s neighbor, was seriously so happy about her bamboo cabin that she absolutely insisted we come back again after the planting season, when it’s all plastered and everything, to stay the night.

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I could post another load of these photos. They were just great, one after another.

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For the sake of transparency, I should admit that there was one woman who hadn’t built a thing; her tin was sitting on the buffalo shed waiting to be used. In the end, we didn’t pre-check all the frames or original houses in Archalbot, because we’d spent so much time there and the homes were so concentrated that we relied on the community to police itself (and in fact, it was a neighbor who brought us over there). This house is one of those that is ambigiously unsafe; cracks in the walls, but generally a more appealing place to live than a temporary house, so it’s kind of up to the owner whether or when they’re going to bit the bullet, move out, and rebuild.

We had an awkward interaction where I politely explained that she didn’t really need a roof – which I could see from looking in her house – so we’d be giving it to another family in the morning. I said we’d welcome do our best to provide anything else she could think of for something she actually needed. That was at 7:30pm. When we came to pick up the tin the next morning at 9:30am, we found the following:

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Well, that worked. For something.

So we have the successful, the more successful than we actually we wanted…and Uttam. Of all the houses in Archalbot, Uttam’s family’s are my favorite. Unfortunately they’re on borrowed land and in the last week and a half, the landowner said they can’t stay, so in theory they’re going to have to relocate this whole operation to their own land, where their ruined house is still taking up a lot of space. As a result they didn’t bother building the front wall. But I still give this house an A- overall, and an A+ for improvement from starting point.

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However the trophy goes to Uttam’s older brother, whose home is quite smaller. Remember when I this family didn’t want to go cut bamboo because they said nobody would help them? When Uttam’s older brother and his wife left for the woods with their tape measure, and when he showed me where he’d planned the guest area? This guy and his wife looked so proud of their house and so grateful that something in this world hadn’t proved to be a sham.

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When I took this photo of Uttam’s brother outside his house with his grandson, he called me over and pointed to the camera, and I knew he was going to say what people always say: “Please send me a copy of this picture.”

But he wanted something else.

“Show this photo to the world, ok?” he said. ”You know, something for people out there to remember me by.”

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Earthquake, Nepal Life, Work

Tractor Cowgirls

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What a wonderful day!

After a week of endlessly trying to chase down corrugated tin, Dilmaya and I spend the entire day today riding around the hills of Nepal delivering roofs in Archalbot in Bharte.

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Our morning started off pretty slowly – I’ll spare you that part – but let’s just say there was heavy rain and 53 bundles of 12 foot, 60kg, corrugated tin involved – when you stack up even some of that tin and try to lift it, it’s as unmovable as a 12-foot block of concrete. There were two tractors and a jeep.  And, of course, one cute little Life Box.

IMG_0146We had a few special deliveries as well – cash relief for Bal Kumari, and a box of ceramic mugs for Muna Bujel’s family, which had completely rebuilt (minus tin) when I met them on that crazy ridgetop in Lakure. When I asked what else they needed, given that they’d done such an amazing job reorganizing their rubble in to a house already, Muna Bhujel looked around and kind of shrugged, like “Lady, look at this whole situation,” and said, “well a lot of our glasses were smashed.” So we threw a set of teacups for her.

It was nearly 11pm by the time we hit the road in Udipur on tractor #1, which was carrying 17 bundles of tin for Archalbot. Voila, Archalbot tin delivery! While we were here, we met three more families requesting roofs. I visited their houses and told them to start building. We’ll be back next week to check on the rest of Archalbot, and we can bring roofs for a few more families if they build before then.

Next, we had to switch to tractor #2 which was loaded up with our major delivery for about 50 homes all over Bharte.  This led to a situation and the following clip of video that pretty much says it all.  Here is what it’s like to try to provide aid for half a million ruined and damaged homes in Nepal’s hills.  An anchoring wire on a footbridge had popped out of the mud softened by the rains, and our tractor couldn’t get over it.  This video takes place about half a mile from a paved highway, on a 10-meter stretch of the only road that leads up to the village.  We did this for ONE HOUR before crossing this little patch of road that is the access point for the entire hillside of Bharte.

We finally got to our first stop in Sirwari, which was totally awesome.  When I first visited Sirwari about a week and a half ago, three families were living together under this tarp.  We asked them to build a good quality bamboo house and promised a roof.  When we arrived today, they had built this gorgeous bamboo community home for all three families!  I love this photo because you can still see their old tarp in the middle, hanging out until we can put it out of business with corrugated tin.  We delivered said tin that very afternoon, and promised we’d come back to see the finished product and spend the night.

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We looked at some of the other bamboo frames in Sirwari, and of course I wanted to take lots of photos and hang out and talk with everyone and Dilmaya was texting me madly to hurry up because we still had two tractors and a jeep full of tin and a lot of deliveries to make.  On the way, we picked up Sarita, Kripa’s young sister in law, whose house we’ve been staying in in Archalbot, and who’s become our pal.  The three of us crammed in to the two-person seating area in the front of the jeep, and we were off again, eating some lychees.

Our next stop was Bharte Banjang.  As far as I could tell, it’s the poorest, most remote and devastated area that we’ve visited.  Lakure is also quite remote, but people there had mostly rebuilt, whereas in Banjang, we met families with lots of young kids living between rusty tin or having moved in to the buffalo shed, with the buffalo.

IMG_0219We brought new tin for 10 homes, housing 49 people, to Banjang.  By now we were in a hurry, so I don’t have as many photos, but the building quality wasn’t as good in this area.  People didn’t have access to long bamboo nearby, so even though our coordinator in Bharte offered long bamboo off his land for free, nobody went and got it.  Many of the frames this community had made were far to low to stand up in.  Instead of the bamboo wall technique we saw in Sirwari, which is tight and can be plastered with mud and made permanent like Tulasi’s house in Parbat, people had simply criss-crossed bamboo, like this, which is far less secure.  This is kind of a mystery to me.  I wasn’t IMG_0233sure why so many of the people in Banjang had made structures with such obvious problems.  We decided we’ll do our best to provide day employment for some of the Sirwari people to come up and help the people in Banjang.  We’ll see how that goes.  In any case, at least these folks will be able to move out of the buffalo sheds and such.  I will venture to say that if we had not required that people build before providing these roofing sheets, this is an area where a lot of our tin would likely have sat in the yard or been thrown on top of unsafe houses.

From there we went to Lakure, my favorite spot in Bharte, where we delivered tin to Bal Kumari, and gave her $300 in cash that she was not expecting, to repay her loans.  Here is Muna Bhujel’s father with the teacups we gave him.  As you can see, he is pretty much speechless.

IMG_0236Then it was time to go to Besigaun for another 12 homes.  By now it was dusk, and as we headed out to our final few stops, it was night.  We made our deliveries in the dark.

Now, are you realizing we’ve left something out here?

Life Box, man.  Life Box.

We took this box out here and there to show people, but it was all so hectic that we didn’t really have time to do much with it.  I mean there wasn’t exactly time to dig a hole in the ground and bury the thing.

At our very last stop, we realized we had an extra bundle of tin, and this nice guy, Lok Bahadur Bhujel, and his son, came out and found us in the road.  They had built a temporary house but for now they’d covered it with a tarp, and wanted to ask us for help.  Well, as it happened, we had an extra bundle of tin that needed a home, so off it went.  Along with the Life Box!

Well, that was one of the more interesting days of my life.  All together, we covered over 50 houses and about 250 heads.  We’ll come back to Bharte in a week or so to check on things and see how some of these homes turned out. Dilmaya and I ended up spending the night at Sarita’s birth home in Bharte, and let me tell you, we did not have any trouble falling asleep.

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Earthquake, Work

The Life Box

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A short post that I think will speak for itself. Not a bad way to spend a day off in Besishahar.  And why call it a “safe-box”? That sounds like a receptacle for used syringes. “Eva” means life. World, welcome to the one and only (literally) Life Box.

Tomorrow, during our tin delivery in Archalbot and Bharte, we’re gonna take this sample around and see what people have to say about it.

Read more about what this doo-dad is and how the idea came about here.  The idea is to create a secure storage space for people whose homes were compromised in the earthquake and now have no private place to lock away precious items.

So, we begin as follows:

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This random treasure chest looking thing was lying around so we used it as a model in discussing the design.

 


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Everything in life starts with a beat up piece of unassuming sheet metal.

 

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All the pieces of our Life Box were made by hand – every piece of metal is cut by having one guy hold the chisel in place along a straight edge, while the other guy whacks the chisel.

 

Making reinforced edging. High tech!
Making reinforced edging. High tech!

 

This shop is full of random stations like this
This shop is full of random stations like this

 

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and this

And twenty four hours later…
This!
This!
Sneak preview…this is right after I got out of the bus and set our new toy down at the bus stop…

Around Town, Earthquake, Nepal Life, Work

The Long Road to Tin

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IMG_0105Everyone predicted a tin shortage in Nepal, and now it’s here. Just last week, I got two bundles of tin for Uttam’s family in the morning and delivered it to them in the afternoon. Now we are ready to bring 53 bundles of tin to our two villages, Archalbot and Bharte, and we’ve been trying to get tin for five days. I have all kinds of random new phone numbers stored in my phone – in addition to all the people we’ve met in the communities where we working, I now have contacts for Tin Shop Dhumre, Tin Shop Lamjung, Tin Shop Udipur…

Last tuesday night at about 6pm, I finally found a hardware store, on reference from one of the guys we’ve gotten to know in Archalbot, that had the 50 bundles of 12ft. tin we needed.  They had a tractor and everything. We’ve been putting people off in our villages for about five days, so we confirmed our plans on the phone and got ready to go the next morning.

Dilmaya and I set out in a cab from Pokhara at 6am. On the way, we decided to provide $300 in cash relief to Bal Kumari to help her repay her loans, because I shared a post about her on facebook and people offered to support her. So we had to find an ATM that would work in Dhumre. Two of them wouldn’t take my card, and finally Dilmaya was able to withdraw $300 and I shoved it in my bag and we were off again.

We arrived at the tin shop in Udipur, just north of Bote Orar before you get to Besishahar, and things started to get crazy. First, our cab driver demanded more than the fare he’d agreed to. Then, the tractor driver seemed like he was never going to show up. But things got really funky when the shop owner suddenly informed us that the tin would be $10 cheaper per bundle than she’d promised me on the phone the night before. In rupee terms, that’s an extra 53,000 rupees – enough to cover ten entire houses according to her original price.

I normally keep my southasian cool pretty well, but I was enraged. This is exactly what the government said wouldn’t happen when others said it would happen. And our hands were totally tied: we had fifty families who had built homes and, after we’d told them to sit tight each day for a week, were waiting for us to show up with roofs because we’d totally promised this time it was for sure. Today.

There’s also the blinding fury of watching people casually do something awful, such as profit off of the plight of earthquake victims and manipulate social workers encumbered by a tin shortage.  Certain things will really light your fire, if you know what I mean.

Stuck between an major rock and a hard place, called our pal Pradeep, the head official of shelter relief for Lamjung district, to explain our plight. Among other things, he told us to check the weight of the tin. Turns out that even 26 guage tin comes in all different weights and thicknesses. When we went and looked, the tin was only 42kg…lightweight. It folded like tinfoil.  They were selling it at the price of medium weight tin which is 25% stronger.

Reluctantly, Dilmaya and I realized we had to give up our plans for the day and drive up to Besishahar, Lamjung headquarters. We’d spoken repeatedly with tin vendors there on the phone, but it was impossible to get any straight answers. We were going to have to sit down in person at a tin vendor and wait it out, even if it meant calling all of our contacts in their villages, again, and telling them, again, to trust us.  We were still coming.  Really.

Before we left Udipur, we walked up the street and took down the name and number of another tin vendor named Sagar. He seemed like an honest guy. In any case, we sure had learned all the right questions to ask, and we needed all hands on deck.  The way the tin situation is working is that vendors in this region, which is in central nepal along the edge of the earthquake’s epicenter in Gorkha, drive about 10 hours south to Chitwan to pick up tin near the border in India.  Then they drive it back up here.  Often, they can’t say for sure what kind of tin they’ll be returning with until they get there and see what’s in stock.  That’s what Sagar was up to later that day.   If you’re lucky, you can order ahead of time and there will be a delivery of exactly the thing you need, which is what we were trying to do.

IMG_0106So that’s how we found ourselves in this shop, Raja Enterprises, in Besishahar, where we sat for about three hours, watching the owner Rajesh make calls about tin. And at 5pm, when we’d finally secured and ordered the tin, and it wasn’t going to come for a week, we were ready to get in a bus back to pokhara, successful on one hand and defeated on the other.

Then my phone buzzed. It was Sagar from Udipur – the guy we met in the morning. He was driving to Chitwan to pick up tin and could get us the 50 bundles we needed by the day after tomorrow.

Reboot. Reschedule. We reordered the tin from Sagar. Plus some other items of a different size from Rajesh in the shop where we’d spent three hours. By now we knew our list of households, the size of their tin, the number of people in their homes and the areas of these villages they live in so well that we were referring to them by their first names. FIFTY OF THEM.

Dilmaya got a call from a friend and said wearily, “I’m ready to open a tin business.”

So this all meant that we were going to stay the night in Besishahar, and hang around tomorrow, because there was no point in going all the way back to Pokhara only to turn around again tomorrow night.

It was late evening and we were absolutely wiped out. On the way home, we passed a steel-working shop, and suddenly I had an inspiration.  After all, we had a day to kill in Besishahar, and this place looked like a Willy Wonka Dreamland of junk turned wonder.

I went in and described my imaginary safe-box. “Is this something you could make?” I asked.

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A Willy Wonka Dreamland of Junk Turned Wonder

A Willy Wonka Dreamland of Junk Turned Wonder

Earthquake, Nepal Life, Reflections, Work

Glamping and Magic Cake Houses

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Reading over my blog entries, I’m realizing I’ve left out some of the nicest details of the hospitality we’ve received in Archalbot this week. So let’s just put them all together.

Detail #1: Glamping

IMG_9481Dilmaya and I stayed at Kripa’s house. It’s standing, but unstable, so we’re all sleeping outside or in small rooms on the edges of the house. For years I’ve joked with Aamaa about going to sleep with the buffalo, or sending Pascal and Aidan to sleep with the buffalo when they’re being cheeky. Now, I can say I’ve actually slept with the buffalo. This glamping site (a phrase I learned this winter when a new “glamorous camping” hotel was going up in Pokhara) was one of the best places I’ve ever gotten to sleep. I loved dozing off each night in the open air and waking up slowly each morning to a cool breeze rustling over the corn, the green hills coming in to focus through the mosquito net.

Later in the week it started raining, so Kripa’s mother moved the bed to the porch. Cute, right? Our last night in Archalbot it rained heavily all night and all morning, and I lay on this cot listening blissfully to the tap-tap-tap-tap on the tin roof.

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Detail #2: Dancing

The night before Robin and Colin left Archalbot, we had a dance party at Kushal’s house, in the same yard where we first met this whole community just a short week and a half ago. It was so much fun. All the uncertainty and worry that the earth bag house hadn’t been finished, who had and hadn’t fulfilled what responsibility, what would be done next and who’d been let down or left out…everyone just kicked back and had a big old dance of it.  Which is how we handle potentially stressful situations in Nepal.

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Detail #3: This Grandma

For the days when we had lots of help with the earth bag house, everybody, and I mean everybody, pitched in. You just couldn’t miss this grandma, who unfailingly monitored the scene all day, and during stone-breaking, sat with her legs in a perfect South Asian squat, clicking stones in to pebbles.  One day, I was loading rocks on to our makeshift carriers, and she came over and carefully began placing stones one at a time on to the tarp, with this kind of tentative body language that said, “I mean why not? It’s the thing to do.  Let’s see about it.”  After I got too excited and overloaded one bundle, we made the next one a little lighter so she could carry it with me. I couldn’t choose between these two amazing photos so you’re getting both of them.

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Detail #4: Breaking stones

IMG_9624The foundation of the earth bag house is made of alternating layers of stone and packed dirt, and the first two layers of the house itself are made from sacks filled with little stones, which I now know to be called giti. In order to get enough stones, Mahendra’s family demolished one of the unstable rooms of their house, which was highly satisfying since the house will eventually need to be taken down anyway. Then, for days, there were all these people just sitting around clinking away at stones. A lot of the women and kids worked incredibly hard on this.

I’ve always had an association between stone-breaking and the awful child labor that you often see in the river bed: poor families breaking stones all day in the hot sun, children out of school. But this scene was totally different. It was like some kind of anti-submission-to-earthquake factory. It felt defiant and exhilarating having all these people in the community dismantling their own home in order to put the pieces in to the heavy foundation of a new house.

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Detail #5: Flour

We used recycled sacks for the earth bag house, and they had previously contained flour. A team of two to three people was fully devoted to shaking out each and every sack to gather the palmfuls of flour remaining in each bag. Over the course of hundreds of sacks, the flour piled up like so. And, as Mariah pointed out, our earth-bag house was also something of a cake-house, and our team looked like a bakery.

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Detail #6: Kushal

I interviewed Kushal twice. Once, so he could show me around his house (look for him in an upcoming radio piece for BBC’s The World). The second time, to ask him what he thought about this whole housing thing, and what his perfect house looks like in his imagination. He talked to me about magic, in english, and I recorded it:

“Everything is magic. I walk, you walk, it is a magic. We can jump, we can speak, anything is magic. This is a house, it is also a magic. In the stone age, there was nothing like this house. In the stone age people lived in caves and they didn’t feel safe because animals can any time harm them. But we can feel safe here. There are many inventions like radio, microphone, camera, and DVD, laptop, computer and radio, it is also a magic. The people are developing magic. I don’t know surely, but I want to do some magic in my life. My life is also a magic that someone has gifted me, and your life is also a magic that someone has gifted you.”

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Earthquake, Nepal Life, Work

You Win Some, You Delay Some Wins

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Well the earth bag house was coming along pretty well, but this week the rain started, which means planting season has begun. Colin has been working incredibly hard for hours a day in the heat, along with Moriah, an American volunteer who found out about the project on the facebook page that’s being used to coordinate earth bag building projects in Nepal. But completing an earth bag house in a week requires 8-10 people working all day, and we’ve had trouble getting consistent manpower from Archalbot.

I also have to confess that my part in the collaboration with the earth bag project went differently than I expected. After our experience in Parbat, I thought our main housing challenge was motivating people to gather bamboo (or other natural materials from the environment or their damaged homes) and build good quality shelters for us to provide tin roofing for. I expected, at the start of this week, that the earth bag project would be leverage for other local building projects, starting with Uttam’s bamboo house – in other words, that people’s interest in seeing the earth bag home completed would motivate them to fulfill our requirement that they also build a bamboo home for another especially needy family. I also expected that not everyone in Archalbot needed or wanted to move out of their cracked homes and live in bamboo houses. We thought we’d end up with be two high-quality sample homes in Archalbot – one earth bag, one bamboo – and residents would choose to one or the other them if they desired.

Instead, what happened is that once Uttam’s bamboo house started getting built, everyone became extremely motivated to go cut bamboo and make similar homes. It was much more successful than I ever imagined. And the earth bag house, while a brilliant long-term building solution, is extremely labor and resource intensive compared to familiar local building methods such as bamboo. With time and money scarce, everyone quickly became pre-occupied with the solution that met their needs and existing skills most efficiently. By mid-week, the strategy had reversed: we were pushing people to finish the earth bag home as a requirement for further tin distribution for bamboo houses.

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Uttam’s family’s two bamboo houses under construction

I realize maybe this is starting to sound a little weird – us putting these conditions in place for aid distribution, leveraging one community project against another. But that’s often the best way to collaborate as well as introduce new concepts or infrastructure in a place where people are used to doing things a certain way, and where the hierarchy of priorities is a well-entrenched survival system. We use this principle all the time when we do dental care. We have to put conditions in place that wedge new priorities in to this hierarchy: providing treatment only at the clinic and requiring people to go there to access it; charging nominal fees; making sure local shopkeepers sell toothpaste, but not giving the toothpaste out for free, so that people have to buy it themselves from the same place they buy sugar and soap. The reason for this isn’t for our benefit, it’s that the goal of our dental project is not to distribute toothpaste or provide one-off treatments, but to elevate the overall level of long term, sustainable oral health care in the places we work.  That only happens when people reorder their own priorities and behaviors, no matter what country or situation they live in.

Similarly, the purpose of the earth bag house is to train people in an earthquake-safe, affordable building method. But at first, it’s just a weird performance using rice sacks and dirt, so you can’t blame IMG_9549people for wondering if it’s really worth their time. It’s important to leverage the attractive elements of the project: the creation of a new structure, the intrigue of a new idea brought by foreigners, the incentive that we’ll provide materials to trainees for building one of these houses themselves. If we can capture participation based on these points, we can hopefully keep people’s attention long enough to teach the skills we want to transfer.  Like our dental clinics, the point is to see people absorb this safe-building technique over the long term because they realize it has value.

So leveraging earth bags and bamboo against each other was a great idea, but the thing I didn’t anticipate was that the time of year and the urgent need for shelter would make the one of the two so much more attractive. So for anyone out there doing earth bag building, my suggestion is, wait until about late September, just before the harvest time. Better yet, the best time of year would be December or January, the only season when there’s any semblance of a real break from field work. While earth bagging is a fast, democratic construction method compared to a block or large mud and stone house, it does require a lot of city-based resources and labor compared to other readily available options. There are almost no families that have 8-10 people in their household who can work intensively for 8 hours a day for a week, and definitely not during rice planting season. That means that families will have to hire labor, and that means other people need to have time.

IMG_9720In the end, Colin and Robin decided to have Archalbot build a bamboo shelter around the half-finished earth bag home, with the goal of returning to finish it up in the fall. So here is a photo of our nepal’s first earth-bag-bamboo-tarp home. Tarp soon to be replaced by bamboo.

In the evening, the community had another meeting about why the earth bag house hadn’t been completed. There was quite a bit of contrition – people hadn’t fulfilled their promises to help out. But there was still confusion over the concept that the earth bag house was a training opportunity, not a private building project. No matter how many times we explained this – and I speak pretty fluent Nepali, and Dilmaya is Nepali – the tendancy has been for people to think of the earth bag project as “Mahendra’s house.”

In any case, there was this slightly downer of a meeting, and everyone vowed that when Robin returns in the fall they will all be totally ready to devote time to completing the training. Then we went home to eat dinner, and I got a phone call from little Kushal.

A speaker system had been set up in the yard, and we had a rocking dance party. And why not, man. You win some, you delay some wins. When I left in the morning, there was cut bamboo lying around all over the place, ready for construction.

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Earthquake, Nepal Life, Work

Small Bundles in Big Spaces

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View across the valley, from Bharte

After my visit to Bharte, I went up to Besisahar to spend the night. Many of the international NGOs working in Lamjung operate out of a hotel called the Himalaya Gateway, and I wanted to sit in on a training by the Danish Red Cross on shelter distribution. Plus, I had to retrieve our first delivery of tin: two bundles for Uttam’s family.

I arrived bedraggled and hungry at the hotel at 8:15 pm after many hours of hiking up and down in Bharte in my flip flops (points for irony on the hotel name, Himalaya Gateway). I sat down and talked for a while with Laurienne, the head of CARE’s relief effort in Lamjung. I’d met her at one of the shelter cluster meetings and found her to be a really nice person, so I’ve kept in touch. It’s pretty funny that I’m running around in my flip flops in Bharte and taking a bus to Besisahar to a pick up our first two bundles of tin, while Laurienne is coordinating the transport of 1200 bundles of tin on 28 tractors – TWENTY EIGHT TRACTORS – we had a good laugh over just the image of 28 tractors climbing up the narrow jeep “roads” of Lamjung district. A bit of a nervous laugh, too. The delivery of all this tin is probably going to take a toll on Nepal’s fragile environment. The Red Cross has committed to almost four times that many homes in Lamjung alone – one of the less affected districts.

Speaking of damage, I got myself a pint of ice cream (“Ma’am, how many scoops would you like?…The whole container?…????…Certainly.”). I turned on the air conditioning in my hotel room which noisily and enthusiastically set to delivering air at the same temperature as the rest of the room. I took a shower and fell asleep on the fluffy bed.

The next morning I went to the Red Cross shelter training. It was super interesting, but probably not something I will be able to use much. The topic was how to conduct efficient mass distribution of tin sheets, building kits, and envelopes of cash. For your kind information, and so I can make some use of my training, I offer you the following tips on distributing thousands of corrugated tin sheets to remote Nepal: distribution area has one entry and one exit; recipients move through in a single straight line only, no criss-crossing; vests must be worn at all times and a flag clearly visible to signal that this is a humanitarian space; a question and complaint-receiver stays outside the delivery area.

Also, it is suggested that your team (and, one assumes, your tractors) arrive at your distribution area the night before.  Because there might be some problems with travel.  Maybe.

Mean time, I was coordinating our first delivery of a grand total of two bundles of tin for Archalbot. In the morning, I ran in to the Chief District Officer of Lamjung at the hotel, and of course, we are old friends. I said I was delivering two bundles of tin today in Archalbot and asked if he had any transport suggestions.

The Chief District Officer looked at me funny and said, “Two?” Awkward pause. “That…doesn’t seem like a enough.”

Right right, I said.  True enough.  But see it’s part of this thing that’s going step by step. I promised there’d be more.  There will totally be more.  Also, I’m two bundles ahead of the Red Cross, and I’m going to enjoy every bundle of my lead for each hour that it lasts.

It was about 2:00 by the time I hopped in to a truck with our two bundles of tin. The hardware store owner had a delivery vehicle that was headed south anyway, and agreed to take our tin sheets (and me) for free. And thank goodness this truck was large enough to house a killer whale, because only thing inside it was our two little bundles of tin, which you literally couldn’t even see in the gaping darkness.

We hit the road and I called Kripa to say I was on my way with Uttam’s roof.

IMG_9669When we arrived in Bote Orar to unload the tin by the side of the road, about eight people from Archalbot had come down to roll the sheets and carry them up to the village (note to self: get a tractor when it’s time to deliver tin to the other 15 families). I hoisted an end of one tin roll over my shoulder, uttam’s sister in law took the other, and we were off.

I could hardly believe it when I arrived at Uttam’s house.  I’d only been away for 24 hours, but what used to be the tarp shelter in one field was now two bamboo frames under construction, with lots of people about.

The family called me for snacks. They had gone to buy a few kilograms of meat – a pricey indulgence – to feed to all the people.

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Later, I was talking with Uttam’s brother. Even after all the days we’d been in Archalbot, working on the earth bag house, sleeping in Kripa’s home, stopping by to visit people in their yards and encouraging them to go cut bamboo, eating and bathing and washing our clothes with everyone else – after all this, Uttam’s family wasn’t completely convinced that we’d really show up with their tin.

It wasn’t until I’d called from the truck a few hours earlier, to say I was on my way from Besisahar with the tin, that the mood turned celebratory. That’s when someone was sent out to buy the meat.

Oh, and also, added Uttam’s brother, they’d made this excellent and spacious bamboo frame, and as I could plainly see, one bundle of tin wasn’t going to be enough to cover it.  They would need another, he informed me.

Very clever, Uttam’s brother.

Uttam and his brother building their bamboo house

Uttam and his brother building their bamboo house

If there’s one moment that will stay with me the most, it’s when I asked Uttam’s oldest brother, who is building the IMG_9677smaller upper house, to explain what each area of the inside would be when it was done.  He and his wife had clearly thought about this.  He pointed to the place where the kitchen fire would be, and the sleeping area (there weren’t exactly a lot of rooms, but that’s not the point).  I motioned to a spot at the edge of the house that was a few feet wide.  From the frame it was clear that the roof would slope down over it.

“What is this for?” I asked.

“That’s a place to stay if someone comes to visit,” he said.

Uttam’s family’s two houses are still going up, but before I left the next morning, I was happy to take this picture of his wife and two month old baby.  Another small bundle in a big space…nice improvement.

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Earthquake, Nepal Life, Work

Uttam

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Dilmaya and I spent two days in Archalbot, helping with the earthbag house and talking with members of the community about the upcoming week of building. The plan is for the whole group to take a one day gap on Monday to build the bamboo shelter for family living under the tarp. A lot of our time went in to talking with that family, especially with the son, Uttam.

Uttam is 21 years old and he’s the first person in his family to get an education. He stayed in school until sixth grade; his two older brothers didn’t go to school at all. But his younger sister got through eighth grade, and his youngest brother is currently in tenth grade. If the younger brother passes his school leaving exams, he’ll be the very first person in Uttam’s family to graduate from high school.

As a teenager, Uttam got a job in Dubai through a labor company, where he earned $200 a month. HeIMG_9708eventually learned to drive a bulldozer there – a fairly lucrative skill – but the company never raised his salary. In Nepal, he can’t drive a bulldozer without a license, and he says it costs a lot of money to obtain a license. So for now he’s got a job working in Chitwan.

Uttam and his wife met over the phone. Love marriage. Their baby is two months old and his wife is seventeen.

“Almost eighteen,” she said.

I wanted to take some time to appreciate Uttam’s situation from his point of view. It was frustrating for Dilmaya and me, as well as for the other neighbors, to have to work so hard to motivate his family to go gather bamboo for us to help them make a decent shelter. “It’s so hard to make them understand,” the neighbors kept saying with mild distain. And certainly enough, any time we discussed the plan with them, they seemed distrustful and obstinate. The truth is that if it hadn’t been for the baby and the insanity of their current living situation, it would have seemed like a poor use of our time, given how many people need help.

But what I began to realize as I talked with Uttam was that he didn’t believe anyone was really going to show up and help them build. The bamboo actually costs money because it’s on someone else’s land, and even if they arranged a barter instead of payment, Uttam’s family didn’t have any reason to believe anyone was going to reward their investment.

The more I talked with Uttam, I began to see the bias of the outside world, whose border was no further away than the border of the family. Uttam is facing tremendous odds. The fact that he can read is progressive in his context. He has traveled to Dubai and Chitwan for work and learned to operate a bulldozer. Bootstrapping has never meant trusting anything. It has meant knowing nothing is on your side, grabbing the closest rung on the ladder with a free hand, but never moving your feet off the rung you’re on when there’s no assurance the next one isn’t rot. Of course it is hard for Uttam and his family to “understand.” What he understands is the reality he is in, not the one someone else is telling him is possible.

Like all of us.

The truth is that, they have largely adjusted to seeming like a poor use of someone’s time.

Dilmaya and I were standing with Uttam outside his tarp tent at dusk, after a day of failed attempts at bamboo collection. They have almost fifteen people living in here. It was unclear to us how hard they were really trying. To some extent, maybe landowners were giving them a hard time about accessing the bamboo; on the other hand, maybe their efforts were half-hearted. We had no way of knowing.

“Well,” I said, “I can tell you one thing. If you don’t cut any bamboo and clear out this tarp thing, you can be sure nobody is going to come here and help you build on Monday.”

He looked at me with the squinty smile, like, “You’re funny. Fair point.”

As Dilmaya and I were leaving Sunday morning, Uttam’s relatives stopped by.

They were headed out with a sickle and tape measure.

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