Project Phongsali: Villagers work cooperatively to build a house.
Day 59
Mr. Seeun, the blacksmith’s brother, is constructing a house. He asked our team to clear the lot where he and his friends are currently building the traditional, stilted, thatched-roof, bamboo-walled structure. I had to turn down his request. Our project just doesn’t have the funding to permit us to conduct time-intensive, “sub-surface” clearance. It’s one thing to respond to problem ordnance that villagers find, and another to start looking for ordnance wherever people suspect it might lurk. So much land in this area is contaminated that we would soon be undertaking a complete sweep of the village and the fields around it.
Sop Houn villagers deserve more comprehensive clearance but it just isn’t possible for us, the first humanitarian group to work here in 37 years, to do all things for all people. Hopefully, some other organization with a larger endowment will learn about our work, be inspired by our efforts, and tackle the bigger problem.
Mr. Seeun’s project looks to go from empty lot to finished house in less than a week. There are about twenty villagers on the site in a scene reminiscent of an Amish barn raising. Young men scramble on rafters twenty feet overhead, hammering and sawing to beat the band. Old men, too brittle to risk the overhead work, remain safely at ground level trimming boards with their machetes. Interestingly, there’s hardly a store-bought tool to be found. True to form, the workers’ hammers, saws, chisels, knives and machetes have all been fashioned from recognizable pieces of old ordnance and other war material: a hand-made house being built with hand-made tools.
Nobody seems particularly concerned over tolerances. I doubt there is a measuring tape or level on the site. People just eyeball things; they nail materials in place and then cut, slice, hack or grind off whatever sticks out.
The walls of the house will be made of split bamboo. Every woven panel I saw handed up to the crew overhead was a near perfect fit for the job. I suspect that the standard unit of measurement for this project is “one bamboo panel”, and that when the whole project is completed the total area can be calculated as “so many panels wide by so many panels long”.
As the men work, women at ground level stoke cooking fires and tend simmering pots of food. Clearly, anyone lending a hand will be well fed.
To my surprise, children are scarcely to be seen. I’d have predicted ankle-biters all over the work site, if not attempting to lend a hand, then rubber-necking, and underfoot. But…today’s effort just might be one of the few Lao endeavors where children are not welcome. (The prevailing attitude around the project seems to be: “Time’s a wasting!” That’s not a typical Lao point of view so, perhaps, special rules apply).
A home-made house built in a week with home-made tools