Building Someone's Castle

(Luana:) I think Habitat for Humanity is one of the world’s great organizations and have volunteered with them in Canby, so we were really happy that we had the opportunity to participate in a “build” in Ghana as part of our Semester at Sea group. About 120 of our shipmates worked on three homes over three days in a village called Adadientem in Birim Agya, about 2 hours from Accra. A number of homes have already been built there and the community has several hundred people.

Our group of 40 went on the third and last day and we were divided into three teams. Our group had about six shovels, one pick ax, a wheelbarrow and two bowls, and our job was to move dirt about 100 feet from a rocky mound to fill in the foundation of a cinderblock house. (Another group had to pump water and mix cement to mold building blocks; there was only one form, and they said just pumping the water in that heat was exhausting.) I felt pretty cocky pushing the first three wheelbarrows filled with dirt, but soon switched to digging and chipping dirt from the rocks, and finally settled for stamping dirt into place or sitting in the shade and trying to avoid heatstroke.

It was hot, hot, hot, and everyone became very wet and dirty, but we had a lot of fun and we couldn’t have had a nicer group to work with. One person played her Ipod and everyone danced while shoveling. Several of the kids were people I knew from my English lit class, and my friend Chandra (in the picture with the bowl on her head) kept me laughing as she leapt in slow motion while carrying bowls of dirt. She has a gift for making things fun!

We also enjoyed meeting the people in the village, who made lunch for us. Many children were around because they have to attend school in shifts -- there aren’t enough teachers or classrooms, so there is a morning school and an afternoon school -- and some of the students gave them stickers, which they put all over their arms and faces. So cute…

What struck me most was how hard we worked and how little we accomplished. We all wished we could have done more for them. At home, we think nothing of calling up a contractor to bring a backhoe and dig things out for us. But these folks don‘t have that luxury. Their houses, simple as they are, represent a lot of physical labor. With a backhoe, one person could have had the entire foundation filled in in a couple of hours. As it was, it would take a group like ours several days to get the job done.

We didn’t meet the family that is going to live in the house we worked on, so I’m going to have to imagine them enjoying it, cooking meals, planting a garden, hanging laundry to dry, or walking down the road to go to school. I hope their house is finished soon.