Embedded Files
From January 7 to January 19, 2012, Larry and Ann worked with a Habitat team in Kenya, building homes with internally displaced families near the small town of Maai Mahiu. Here's our blog about that project.
Dealing with displacement
Naivasha, Kenya
January 8, 2012
By Ann Cooper
It's easy to see why British colonizers flocked to central Kenya in the early 20th century. The farmland is lush, the climate soothed by cool breezes, the landscapes stunning -- and studded with breathtaking wildlife.
So many British settlers came that by 1948 30,000 white settlers sprawled across 12,000 square miles of Kenya's most fertile land, displacing many members of Kenya's largest tribe, the Kikuyu, some of whom were herded into native reserves.
Habitat's Kenya affiliate and Global Village teams are confronting a more modern displacement in central Kenya now: the plight of those who remain homeless since 2007 national elections sparked violence that killed over 1,000 people and sent some 630,000 fleeing their homes. (The 630,000 is Habitat's number -- others put the number of displaced at about half that. Either way, a massive problem.).
Here in Naivasha, in the center of the vast Rift Valley, 24 of us have arrived to help with a Habitat project that is resettling 335 families who have spent the past several years surviving in tattered tents, unable to return to their pre-2008 homes.
Almost 300 families have already moved in to new three-room Habitat houses, built by the families and many volunteers. Among the Global Village volunteers was a team led last August by our friends Danielle Schukra and Matt Ostrowsky. My son, Tom Keller, was part of that build, and we have come here with some of Tom's photos for the families, whom we will meet Monday afternoon.
Almost all of us on this build have worked before with Bob and Leslie Bell, who are leading this Kenya team -- the 40th Global Village team they have organized. That is testimony to their deep commitment to Habitat and its goal of providing decent housing.
Tomorrow we will all learn what the Bob and Leslie Bell team will be doing to further that goal at the Maai Mahiu camp for internally displaced persons in Kenya.
Life in a tent oven
Kenya Maai Mahiu Habitat project
January 9, 2012
By Ann Cooper and Larry Heinzerling
It’s an oven inside Mary Wambui Mwangi’s tent. Mary, 24, raises her three children (Ian, 7; Mary, 5; Kevin, 4) in a shelter cobbled together from the remains of four-year-old United Nations tents, long sticks, rope and scraps of plastic. There are no windows, no breeze, just a clutter a clothes, cooking pots – and a worn teddy bear dangling from a string attached to the tent ceiling.
But there a
re smiles on the family’s faces and hope just outside the tent door. Sticks nearby outline the perimeter for another stone house – one of four we will build this month, alongside Mary’s and three other families.
A more impressive reason for hope: Mary is one of the last of the 335 families in Maai Mahiu still living in a tent. In fact, this internally displaced persons (IDP) camp is rapidly transforming itself from a refuge of last resort for families displaced by 2008’s post-election violence to a vibrant African village.
Swarms of giggling children surround us as we move down the neat, hard-packed dirt pathways. Each of the 295 families already resettled in Habitat stone houses has a garden plot. Corn, peas, tomatoes and squash are grown. So are beds of cosmos, marigolds and other flowers. The stark stone facades of some of the older homes are softened by lush landscaping; bougainvillea loves the local soil and climate.
Back at Mary’s tent, her son Ian is a favorite for our camera-happy group. His smile is megawatt, but he’s shy when Habitat Global Village coordinator Festus Mutua asks him to talk about himself. “You’re a man,” prods Festus, and Ian responds by mumbling a few words into his chest.
We’ll see if he has more to say when we arrive early Tuesday morning for our first day of work: digging trenches for the four foundations of new homes for Mary and three other IDP families.
Three-room house: yours for $2,700 and a lot of sweat equity
Vumilia Eldoret, Kenya
January 10, 2012
By Larry Heinzerling and Ann Cooper
New Year, new homes.
The Bob and Leslie Bell Habitat team broke ground today for the foundations of three new houses at the Maai Mahui Internally Displaced Persons Camp—known to its residents as Vumilia Eldoret (“Be Patient, Eldoret”). Most of the residents here were displaced from homes and land in the region of Eldoret northwest of here, and the name they use for their new home may express some wistful nostalgia for their old home.
For those of us who tap at computers all workday, it’s impossible to grasp the intensity of the labor involved in building a Habitat house until you’re down in the trenches. Guided by our masons and the string lines they had laid, we grabbed hoes and shovels this morning to hack out trenches two feet deep. The trenches form the perimeter of each 21 x 15 foot house (300 square feet, divided into three rooms).
The masons spread a concrete bed in each trench, then top it with a foundation made
of two layers of volcanic rock and mortar. Guess who drew the job of hauling the rocks (many
of them 20 to 50 pounds each) to each work site?
A little finance: Materials for each house here cost about $2,700 so the total bill for the 335 homes needed is a little over $900,000. Since the first homes were built in September 2009, Habitat has raised enough to build 310 homes – about h
alf from Kenyans, often in response to local TV or radio telethons, the other half from international donors.
Like any construction project, cash flow is important here. “If we can get sponsors all at once, we could build everything in six months – 300, even 400 houses, “ said Paul Githuku, a mason who has been building Habitat homes in Vumilia Eldoret for the last two years. Githuku led the team that dug a foundation today for the home of Priscilla Wanjiru Njuguna, who fled Eldoret’s post election violence in 2008. Njuguna worked alongside our volunteer team, today, hauling heavy canisters of water to help mix concrete for the foundation of her new home. We hope to finish her entire house by the end of next week. After that, Habitat has to raise money to build another two dozen homes before all the families of Vumilia Eldoret can have a decent home. That could happen as early as March or as late as June, all depending on when donors step forward to help with the final $70,000 dollars needed.
Choosing a harsh life
Vumilia Eldoret
January 11, 2012
By Ann Cooper and Larry Heinzerling
Priscilla Wanjiru Njuguna grew up on a farm some 200 miles northwest of here. When she moved from her parents’ land, she used her agricultural skills to make a living, renting farmland to grow corn, kale, beans and potatoes – more than enough to feed herself and sell the surplus for her income.
After the 2007 Kenyan elections, Priscilla, her parents and thousands of Kikuyus in the district around Eldoret were driven from their homes in inter-ethnic violence that left hundreds of thousands displaced across Kenya.
Some, including Priscilla’s parents, have returned home. But Priscilla, aged 30 or 32 (depending on when you ask her)
and her three young sons won’t return.
The violence against the Kikuyus in the Eldoret region, “is not a recent thing,” said Priscilla.”It started about 20 years ago. I was just young.” Her most recent displacement in 2008 was the fifth time ethnic violence has forced Priscilla to leave home.
The life she has chosen, resettlement in Vumilia Eldoret, is a harsh one. Every morning Priscilla rises to make tea for herself, her 6-year-old son Shadrack, and her sons, Samuel, 4, and Daniel, 1 ½, both born during Priscilla’s post-2007 life in exile. The two older boys spend the mornings in a school built by an NGO for the Vumilia Eldoret residents. In the afternoons, they play in the village while Daniel rides on Priscilla’s back, held snug by the colorful cotton cloths that mothers use here to carry their babies.
Priscilla’s crowded dirt compound contains:
A ragtag home with walls of sisal leaves and mud, covered with the remains of a UN refugee tent
An outdoor kitchen whose stove is a stone circle that encloses the wood fire
An elaborate coop, made of dried cornstalks, which shelters six chickens Priscilla bought with money she earned from doing casual farm labor. They have produced eggs for her family and additional income, as well as eight chicks, which just might form the beginning of a mini-business for Priscilla.
The family’s situation will change soon, though. Today, our team of volunteers helped local masons pour the concrete slab that will be the floor of Priscilla’s new Habitat home. And tomorrow we will start placing the dense volcanic rocks that will be mortared into place to form the walls of her house.
The Habitat homes are key to transforming this settlement from a camp of exiles into a new village, Vumilia Eldoret. Once a family can move from its tent to a Habitat home, “We forget what has happened” in the past, said Francis Karinge, who carries the title chairman of the community.
“We forget what is past,” said Karinge. “That’s what I have been telling my people to do.”
The Bells celebrate their 40th
Naivasha, Kenya
January 13, 2012
By Larry Heinzerling and Ann Cooper
Leslie Bell needed a volunteer the other day. “Who will lead the spiritual reflection?” she asked. It seemed to be an open invitation to all 22 of us Habitat Global Village team members currently building in Kenya. But if you looked closely, you could see Leslie’s intense blue eyes targeting just one volunteer: Jim White, a 73-year-old lawyer from Michigan.
In seconds, Jim agreed to lead the morning’s reflection, an institution on Leslie’s GV teams, where each day begins with a story or thoughts from Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, or others who speak eloquently about overcoming injustice and poverty.
“That was the velvet part of the steamroller,” smiled Leslie, after securing Jim’s participation.
The “steamroller” is Leslie, 64, and Bob Bell, 58, who chose Kenya as the destination for this, their 40th Global Village trip as team leaders. When Bob and Leslie mailed Habitat friends about Kenya a few months ago, they had an entire team assembled within a matter of hours. Their trips rarely appear on the GV website because they fill so fast; dozens of Habitat volunteers likely would follow them anywhere, to the remote ends of the world, for the privilege of doing the backbreaking work of building decent homes with low income families in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Mozambique, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Cambodia, or New Zealand.
“You get very immersed in the country with them,” said volunteer Stan Duda, who with his wife Weezie is spending his third January in a row on a Bob and Leslie Bell Global Village team.
The Bells began their Habitat career in 1996. Both were schoolteachers – Leslie taught 8th grade language arts in Alaska, and Bob had a series of more esoteric posts, including running a remote Alaskan school for the children of Russian Orthodox “Old Believer” families. A planned two-year sabbatical from teaching led them to volunteer with Habitat – in Hawaii, on Habitat Collegiate Challenge trips and later at Habitat headquarters in Americus, Georgia, where they began working with Global Village.
Two years came and went and the Bells stayed with Habitat. Their new career is largely unpaid; both work part-time to finance their volunteer passion. Bob spent last winter teaching above the Arctic Circle; Leslie was the local support person for five GV teams that built homes in Anchorage, Alaska last summer.
Why not return to teaching? “We just thought this was too cool,” said Leslie.
“We’ve never been noted for doing things the normal way,” said Bob.
Indeed. Family vacations with their three boys (now all adults) were decidedly unorthodox. One summer featured a 77-day excursion to Europe and the Soviet Union. And there was a five-month adventure in a Volkswagen van visiting national parks in the U.S. The boys, then 5, 7, and 9, were home schooled along the way by Leslie and Bob. All hiked down into the Grand Canyon and back out.
As team leaders Bob and Leslie complement each other. Bob interviews all the volunteer applicants. Once a team is picked, Leslie is the communications chief. Their teams are memorable in part because of the sense of adventure Bob brings to travel, in part because of the passion Leslie articulates for the work done, and in part because both are master storytellers, with dozens of amazing stories to tell.
“To this day I am in awe of [Leslie’s] ability to be objective and always find the best in people,” said Evelyn Trabant, who has known Leslie since the late 1960s.
Evelyn describes both Bells as “excellent listeners” who always “acknowledge the best in everyone.”
Despite their long friendship, it took the Bells more than a decade to convince Evelyn and husband Dennis to join them on a Global Village trip. Evelyn says she worried about lacking any skills to build a house. But this afternoon, she and Dennis proved as adept as any of us (i.e., not very) at flinging mortar to fill in spaces between the volcanic rocks we are stacking to form house walls. With Habitat, commitment counts far more than skills, as Evelyn has learned this week.
“I see it’s a bunch of people like myself,” she said.
So how long will the Bells continue with Habitat? “Health will be what gets in our way, if anything,” said Leslie.
There is so much more to say about the Bells; their story deserves a book, not a blog posting. We haven’t even mentioned Leslie’s sock collection, or Bob’s chic thrift shop wardrobe – or how Jim White met his wife, Martha Shortlidge, on a 2008 Bell GV trip to Nepal.
But perhaps we can persuade them to write their own book about their life as professional volunteers. Meanwhile, if you want to join their next great adventure, a “blitz build” in Nepal Oct. 5-13, when Habitat plans to recruit 200 volunteers to build 45 houses in five days, check out their website: http://sites.google.com/travelwithapurpose
How to build a home in two weeks
Vumilia Eldoret, Kenya
January 16, 2012
By Ann Cooper and Larry Heinzerling
Mixing mortar for a Habitat house bears some resemblance to making muffin batter. Dry ingredients (sand and cement) get sifted together. Then you make a well in the middle, add the liquid ingredients and mix.
But instead of some eggs and a few cups of flour, sugar and milk, the ingredient list for a mortar recipe reads something like this:
20 or so heaping wheelbarrow loads of sand (shoveled and toted by Habitat volunteers from piles that may be 50 yards or more from the work site)
3-4 110-pound bags of cement (carried to the site in wheelbarrows from the Habitat storage shed in this village)
Gallons and gallons of water – just how many is determined by the masons on the site.
There are no sifters or industrial-strength Kitchen Aids here, so the sifting and mixing is all done with shovels and muscle. Sand and cement are “sifted” together by shoveling them from one pile to a new pile – three times. The well is made, water poured in, then the dry ingredients turned, shovelful by shovelful, into the well, until you have a sticky (and very heavy) mass resembling primordial ooze. Keep shoveling, until the masons say it’s ready. In five days this past week, we dug foundations, poured cement slab floors and put up most of the volcanic rock walls for four houses. Mortar holds the rocks in place and fills out the walls to something relatively smooth; masons will come in later to finish the inside walls with a fine plaster.
Our volunteer efforts are important, but few of us have the skills or the strength of the people we are building with.
Carrying water is an endless task – it’s stored in huge, black, community tanks at the edge of the village, and must be hauled by each family to its
home. Water carrying is women’s work here, but not because it’s easier than other tasks. Plastic jerry cans holding perhaps 5 gallons each are filled from the tanks, then carried by hand, head or wheelbarrow.
We volunteers prefer the wheelbarrow method, but while some of us can only tote two jerry cans at a time (some of
us do manage three or four), any woman in the village seems capable of wheeling four full cans at once. When wheelbarrows are not handy, the women knot a length of fabric through the jerry can handle to form a loop that is hooked on top of their heads, so that the can lies on their bent backs. The fabric carrier distributes the weight onto your head and back, which is much easier than hand carrying. But we volunteers who have tried the fabric route still staggered under the weight and quickly returned to the wheelbarrow carry.
Stones for the walls are also carried by hand, wheelbarrow, or hoisted onto one shoulder, a technique volunteer Vince Lewis of California pioneered the first day. Vince is one of the few volunteers who comes close to matching the stamina of our Kenyan building partners. We have all moaned particularly about carrying the rocks; hundreds are required for each house, and each rock must weigh 30-50 pounds.
Ben Maina, a 30-year-old mason who has built 42 of the Habitat houses here, consoled some of us the other day. “If you have been doing this all your life, you could do it easily,” he said. Easy for Ben to say – he began doing construction work under his grandfather’s tutelage when he was a child. He and the other masons make rock lifting, mortar mixing and digging a foundation look relatively easy. We 22 volunteers, with team leaders Bob and Leslie Bell, can testify that none of it is easy work at all.
And yet, with two days to go before the end of our build, we can look with a sense of accomplishment at the work we have done with the masons and Kenyan families. When we leave here, four more families will be close to moving into new, decent housing.
To follow our construction progress, see the photos of trench digging, to setting the cement footer, to hauling volcanic rocks, to mixing cement, to mortaring the rocks into wall shape, until you have a basic structure in place – awaiting rafters and roof.
No first world problems here
Vumilia Eldoret
January 17, 2012
By Larry Heinzerling and Ann Cooper
As we watch life unfold each day in Vumilia Eldoret, we have begun to think about the disconnect we are likely to feel when we return to our “first world” lives next week.
The next time a leaky faucet disrupts our day, we might stop to remember that in all Vumilia Eldoret there are only four faucets for more than 1,300 people. Each faucet opens a spigot on the huge black community tanks where families draw their water into five-gallon jerry cans to tote home.
On Monday morning, perhaps 200 jerry cans stood empty by the two tanks that
provide drinking water. Apparently there was a delivery delay. The cans were still there when we finished work in the later afternoon, though by this morning they were gone.
The next time the washing machine breaks down, we might recall Lucy Nduta’s
laundry line, the one kept full nearly every day as Lucy tries to keep up with the needs of her five children here. Washing is done here in small plastic tubs with big bars of soap.
Of course, even if Lucy had a washing machine, there are no electric lines or generators here to make it run. And yet she has a few tiny LED lights near the ceiling of her sitting room. They were strung up by her 13-year-old son, Amos, now studying in the equivalent of high school. Amos and the other older children here walk several miles to school. By the time they get home it’s nearly dark.
“He needs to learn, and we don’t have money for kerosene,” said Lucy, explaining the contraption her son Amos invented to power the tiny LEDs so that he can study at night. Four D batteries are encased in a soft cardboard roll held tight with rubber bands. Wires attached to the ends create a live circuit and a little light for Amos to read by.
“He’s a clever boy,” said Lucy. “I don’t know how he did that. Because he’s a boy, he just did it.”
We did manage to meet Amos on Saturday, our one non-school day in Vumilia Eldoret. As he scrubbed laundry in his mother’s plastic tubs, he said he particularly enjoys physics class at school.
And the next time we need a new stove and consider first world questions (gas or electric? Four burners or six?), we
will be reminded of the one burner stove every woman uses in Vumilia Eldoret. It’s outside, usually in the form of a stone circle, where the women burn firewood they have collected from surrounding hills, five to seven kilometers away. ”It’s a long way,” one woman told us. “But what can we do?”
Dedication Day
Vumilia Eldoret
January 18, 2012
By Ann Cooper and Larry Heinzerling
On our eighth day in Vumilia Eldoret, we rested.
Roof trusses now crown three of the four houses we have built, from foundation up. Corrugated metal roofing is the next step. It could still be a few more weeks before families can move in; masons with far more skill than we have will give the inside of each house smooth plaster walls. They will also set the windows and doors in place and build cement-floored latrines in each yard.
But the rough stone walls and wooden rafters we have helped to build were cause for celebration today, as we returned for our final visit and dedication of the four homes. Our group visited each house in turn, led by a procession of singing, ululating women from the village. At each home a ribbon was cut, thanks were said, and a mango tree was presented to each family.
What would a ribbon cutting be without a politician? By chance last week Bob and Leslie Bell, our team leaders, met John Mututho, who represents this region in the Kenyan Parliament. Mututho has been an outspoken advocate for the 600,000 people displaced by post-election violence in 2008. He is not without controversy; his plan to resettle another group of internally displaced people (IDPs) has prompted opposition from that group's leaders, who say the chosen site is not good farmland. But Mututho also filed a lawsuit this week on behalf of IDPs, demanding that the government compensate them for damages suffered in 2008 and provide them with services they have lost such as electricity and water.
At this former IDP camp, now named Vumilia Eldoret, Mututho got a warm reception when he arrived (at Habitat's invitation) for this morning's
dedication. Particularly welcome was his statement that the IDPs "will not be moved from here to another place." That promise was enough to prompt some of the women to sing "we will vote for you." Mututho is a candidate for the new post of governor of this region, and the IDPs of Vumilia Eldoret will vote in this region when elections are held, likely later this year. Mututho's lawsuit is a reminder that the houses Habitat is helping build here are only a first step toward moving this population forward in their relocated lives. A few have income sources -- one man sews with a treadle machine under a shade tree, for example, while another has set up a small nursery that provides avocado and mango trees and a variety of other plants that can form protective hedges for the community's gardens and animals (goats, chickens, rabbits). But few have any reliable source of income. The only nearby school is for children in primary grades; it's a project built by Marifiki Community International, an NGO, not by the Kenyan government. A health clinic is only half-built -- again, by Marifiki, not the government.
There has been dental care available to the residents of Vumilia Eldoret for the past week or so. But that's a volunteer project, too, using Canadian dentists and hygienists who have set up a makeshift clinic in one of the Marifiki schoolrooms. They leave tomorrow. Who knows when anyone in Vumilia Eldoret will have access to a dentist again. Perhaps it was these overwhelming needs that seemed to depress a lovely 18-year-old woman Leslie encountered the other day. When Leslie asked what she was thinking about that left her so glum, the young woman replied, "My life." The young woman wants to go to school, but she has a new baby, making that a very difficult prospect. "The journey's never over," Leslie reminded us when she told us that story. Perhaps not. But as we leave Kenya, we feel proud and inspired to have been able to work beside the families of Vumilia Eldoret as they took an important step in their life journey.
Kenya's 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner for environmental efforts to help the poor, Wangari Muta Maathai, has a thought that resonates with us as we head home: "Until you dig a hole, you plant a tree, you water it and make it survive, you haven't done a thing. You are just talking."
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