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Sri Lanka's Big Build Completes 24 Houses
The "Big Build" that Habitat hosted in Negombo from August 5-11 has officially ended. On August 7, day 5 of the event, the 24th house was finished. In addition to the local volunteers, there were 150 volunteers from all over Sri Lanka and other countries (including New Zealand, Australia, the US, and the UK), and 42 of them were from Japan.
The building site, Negombo, is about 1.5 hours north of Colombo by car in the province of Gampaha. Being close to the Bandaranayaka airport, a major gateway into Sri Lanka, and jumbo jets can be seen flying overhead. Houses for 24 families were built close together on this wide tract of land. Volunteers from Japan were divided in to teams, some with volunteers from other countries like New Zealand, to complete 12 houses all together.
3 days into the itinerary, the walls were built up. Concrete and sand were blended, and mortar to hold the bricks in place. Laying bricks is not so easy given that the bricks must be lined up straight, evenly spaced and leveled. Next came pouring of the concrete for the floors. On the 4th day's work began on the roof. After coating the wood for the roof in varnish to prevent the wood from rotting, the teams assembled the roofs carefully following the directions given by the skilled workers. On the 5th day, roofing tiles were laid. After that, ventilation ducts had to be painted so that they would not deteriorate, and finally the doors, windows, and entryways were installed.
The Sri Lankan Minister of Economic Development, Basil Rajapaksa, was present at the closing ceremony. The occasion was to celebrate the success of the event and also the success of Habitat's future activities in the country. The ceremony dedicated the 24 houses that were completed through tape cutting. The families that are to live in the houses boiled milk in small pots, observing the traditional Sri Lankan ceremony of Kiri Itirima to celebrate the end of the construction. They celebrated a new beginning with the volunteers. Also, the event was reported on several media outlets, and the entire country of Sri Lanka heard about the volunteer activities.
Sri Lanka suffered from the civil war lasted for 30 years that had ended in 2009, and also the Sumatran earthquake and Tsunami in 2004. The tsunami was especially devastating for Nigombo and the coastline of Sri Lanka. Including internally displaced and victimized by the disaster, 23% of the population of Sri Lanka is said to be living in poverty. The 24 houses that Habitat built this time were for Tamil and Sinhalese disaster victims, who had no choice but to live in unsanitary, dilapidated conditions. Habitat has been working in Sri Lanka since 1996 and trying to reunite the Tamil, Sinhala and Moor people that were separated by the war. The Big Build was a special event that aimed to bring together the families that are recovering from the war, poverty, and natural disasters, and to commemorate the 17,000 households that have helped by Habitat in Sri Lanka thus far.
