Habitat For Humanity

Until recently, the words "back-breaking labor" and my name were almost certainly never to be found in the same sentence. As of Saturday, my professional skill repertoire has expanded to include brick making. Although to be honest, I was a piss-poor brick maker, and really only excelled at the most unskilled of the unskilled labor tasks: stacking bricks and moving them from one section to another. The Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Foundation is supporting a Habitat for Humanity build in Oudong, a village 60 miles outside of Phnom Penh. Oudong is also home to a beautiful temple, which I didn't see up close, but still admired.

Honestly, it was a really difficult project. I did get to practice my (growing..?) Khmai, and support what will be a new housing settlement for 300 families. Urban displacement of Cambodia's poorest, has grown alongside rising property values in the past five to seven years. Legal protections for land ownership are weak, and people are made to give way to developers with little recourse to compensation for the land they lose. The families who will live in these Habitat homes had all previously lived in a Phnom Penh dump site. They participate in the brick building and house creation, and get paid for their labors.

It was interesting to compare this Habitat project with the Habitat homes I visited in Mozambique. There, grass-thatch roofs and cylindrical styles to match the village style were the norm. Here clay-formed bricks were creating very closely placed and small "starter" homes for families of five, max. We were just making the bricks this weekend (a project that goes on every day...) In November a US Habitat group will arrive to assemble the homes. It would be interesting to visit in a year or so to see how the community has changed, moving from the dump site to the community, 60 miles from their previous homes and sources of livelihood.