Habitat Build (Service)

Habitat Build (10th of November)

Background Information

The family we are going to help is the Ranjith Family. Ranjith is the father of two a daughter and a son. The daughter attends school but the son is too young to attend school. He lives in Minuwangoda which is 1 hour and 30 minutes from school. Ranjith fell from a tree and he legs are paralyzed, and he has being lying on the bed for the past 8 years. At the moment the whole family is living in a very small shed, with no walls or rooms. The pictures are shown below.




As you can see from the pictures they are living in very critical condition. They have no walls, and if it rains all the stuff would also get wet. I cant set the goals until we go and see the place we are working at which we will be going on the 10th of November which is a Saturday.





The Build

We were asked to go to school at 7.00 in the morning, and we left the school at 7.30. when we got there it was around 9 o clock and just as we went to the place we got a very warm welcome and we got straight to work.

The goals i set before i started working were

- Work collaboratively with the local people and also with the other people who came with us on the build.

- Learn how to use new equipment.

- Get as much done as possible.

We got to the place and I noticed that the place they were living was in a very critical condition and a place that no one should live, I also saw the house they were building and it was about half way done but still there were a lot of things to do such as putting the foundation for two rooms, and the builders who are already there were building the walls. The job we were asked to do was to flatten out two rooms that were filled with sand and to get the rocks out of a sand bank. In order to complete this as fast and as efficiently as possible, what we did was we divided ourselves into two groups and one group worked on filtering all the rocks from the sand bank and the other group flatten the two rooms. and there were more people working on flattening the two rooms as it needed more man power. I was assigned to shovel all the sand and to put it into a container. As this is not my first build i had some experience in shoveling and from experience i knew this was going to be hard work and something that takes time so without wasting any time i started to shovel all the sand out.  As a team we managed to finish one room by tea break. After having tea and some bananas we went straight back to work and everyone worked on finishing the other room. This room had more work to be done as there were a lot of sand in it. This time we took turns in doing all the jobs and i got to do all the jobs which was shoveling, hitting the sand so it is soft and the transporting the sand and throwing it into the next room which needed more sand. By lunch time we were done with that room and we had done about 4 or more solid hours of good hard work. After lunch we were all very tired and we all were ready to go home but we still had one other task we had to accomplish which was to filter the rocks out from the sand. We managed to finish half of the sand, but because one of the people who came with us got sick we had to end out trip early and head home, i wasn't complaining much as i think i have done a lot of work and i think i have contributed a lot to the family.  From this build as with a lot of other builds i learned a lot, I learned to work with others and also to work collaboratively with the local community.