Barron County Habitat for Humanity is a non-profit organization located in Northwestern Wisconsin dedicated to eliminating poverty housing. BCHFH was started in 1996 and has helped 20 low-income families have decent affordable housing.
ASBW Day 3: Writing Letters To State Representatives
April 12, 2015
The Mayor of Barron, David Vurnick, spoke to the students about the need for affordable housing in the city of Barron!
After learning about the strong need for affordable housing in their community, the students then paired off to write letters to Wisconsin State Representatives!
"Dear Romaine Quinn,
We are Alora and Kaylee. We do not like the substandard housing that exists in Barron and throughout the world. These houses represent our interst in construction of simple, decent homes. Please consider this when you are in a position to support housing.
Thank you for your time,
Katie and Alora"
The Students then made paper model Habitat Homes to send with their letters!
The kids learned how to make model Habitat Homes out of cardboard boxes!
These homes display an actual floor plan of a Habitat for Humanity two bedroom house in the U.S. Habitat for Humanity, together with volunteers and future homeowners builds simple, decent, affordable houses like the ones the children made and sells them using affordable interest free mortgages!
Act! Speak! Build is a youth program in which it's participants learn about the need for affordable housing not just in their community, but world wide! For Habitat's Act! Speak! Build! Barron County Habitat partnered with the Riverview Middle School Boys and Girls Club in Barron, WI. Their participation in this program is extra special because they are the only children taking part in this program in northern Wisconsin! Prior to this event, the children learned about Barron County Habitat and advocacy.
On Monday April 11th, the children learned how to spread the word by making posters!
The posters displayed information about Habitat and the need for affordable housing worldwide! For example: 1.6 Billion people are live in inadequate shelter world wide!
As we arrive in the village for our second day of construction, our bus is surrounded once again by
throngs of children, and even before it stops moving, we hear shouts of "mzungu!! mzungu!!" (we have become accustomed to hearing this term, meaning "white person," also as we walk through villages, children calling their friends to come and see the visitors). For many of us on the team, interacting with children is one of the highlights of our time in the village.
Today we continue laying bricks, with a little more confidence and speed than yesterday. We enjoy the rare compliment from the local mason when he comes over to inspect our wall and doesn't make little adjustments, or tap bricks with the back end of his trowel to set them just so. It is a lot of fun learning this new craft -- not something we'd take on the first day on a build site in the U.S.!
Lenai carrying loads of bricks - barefoot.
Just as in our affiliate in NW Wisconsin, the Habitat partner families in Malawi help build their own homes, through Sweat Equity. Before we arrived, Mphatso (15) and Bayitoni (12) had dug and helped lay the cement footings for under the brick walls. And they did the backbreaking work of using a pickax to dig a hole, add water and mix to create the mortar, shovel the heavy loads into a wheelbarrow (the kind with a small, hard, airless tire), and put forth the great effort required to push this old wheelbarrow through soft soil to the home. While we worked they worked. But they were working before we arrived in the morning, and continued after we left at the end of the day.
Helping with Sweat Equity
Lenai, the 70-year old grandmother and head of the household, has spent many days hauling heavy bricks, as have other women. Hard work is just a way of life in these rural villages, but to us it was amazing to see the strength and stamina at which the boys and grandmother worked throughout the day (especially for Lenai -- to put this in perspective, the average life span in Malawi is only 55-60).
Because our Global Village trip has a strong focus on education, not just construction, we had the wonderful opportunity to spend additional time with the Habitat Malawi staff. Amos, the Executive Director, joined us on the build site numerous times. The first time I happened to notice that Amos was on site, I saw him down in the pit, digging with the pickax to make the mortar. Another time when I saw Amos "in the pit," he was having caring conversation with the partner family. Amos is a wonderful example to us of a servant-leader.
Today on lunch break we traveled to the Kambwiri Sele Irrigation Scheme to learn about local villagers that have teamed together to form a non-profit agricultural group. The volunteer leadership team told us that in order for people to become a member, they have to pay a fee, which helps fund the deep well that was drilled, and the irrigation system which allows members to continue farming throughout the dry season.
What a stark contrast between the green fields of corn and tomatoes, and the surrounding dessert!
It is wonderful to see examples of the many ways in which the people of rural Malawi have developed sustainable methods to improve their lives, helping them to afford basic necessities, such as food for their family, pencils and notebooks so their children can attend school, and adequate shelter. And this is the goal of Habitat Malawi, not to provide the poor with hand-outs, but rather through Habitat programs to provide a sustainable hand-up, helping families to maintain dignity, and to take ownership and pride through the ways in which Habitat is helping make a difference in their lives.
Music from Home Dedication Ceremony - Pictures coming in Day 6! Jon is playing a hand drum along with 2 local drummers
When we loaded the bus this morning it was with excited anticipation for our first Habitat Build Day. As we arrived in Mbawa Village, we were greeted as usual with song and dance from women wearing colorful dresses. We were introduced to several local masons that Habitat has helped train and employ in building homes. We are also introduced to the two Habitat partner families with which we will be building.
Lenai, Bayitoni, and Mphatso
Let me introduce you to the partner family. My team helped build a home for Lenai and her two grandchildren. Lenai is about 70 years-old (age is approximate in this culture), and she never went to school. She takes care of two orphaned grandchildren, Mphatso (15) and Bayitoni (12), whose parents died when they were young. The boys have both dropped out of school. They are living in a tiny, one-room house made of mud bricks, a dirt floor, and a grass-thatched roof which leaks heavily when it rains. Their house is so bare -- it seems that all their earthly possessions could fit inside the large suitcases I packed for my trip.
During the rainy season, the grass-thatched roof and scraps of plastic do little to keep out the water, and the dirt floor turns into mud. With virtually no windows, ventilation and air quality is poor. If you stop and listen for a moment, you'll hear termites eating away at the roof of the house.
Typical one-room home
The family regularly suffers from colds and malaria. The family uses a nearby temporary structure as a toilet which is not safe. Lenai is grateful for being selected to own a Habitat home.
"Our house is a breeding ground for mosquitoes because we suffer from malaria from time to time. A good house with windows and mosquito-nets will be a great relief to us," Lenai told us. "We will be very grateful to have a house that does not leak, with a cement floor. It is a rare opportunity and we thank God for granting us this opportunity."
The masons, along with help from Lenai and the two boys, had already built the corners of the house, so we were able to jump right in laying up the brick walls. Most of our team had never laid a single brick before stepping on the site, but with the coaching of our mason and a few other locals we managed to gain speed and see the house progress.
In Malawi there are bricks everywhere you go -- brick houses and huts, brick walls, piles of brick along the roadside for future construction. There are two kinds of bricks, both which are molded from mud -- fired, and un-fired bricks. We saw brick "kilns" along the roads, where they stack the bricks high, leaving openings in the bottom to add firewood, and when they've heated the bricks for several days they turn from the brown, earthy color, to a reddish brown.
Un-fired vs. fired bricks. Brick firing kiln in the background.
The matope (mortar) that we use is made simply by digging a hole in the thick soil near the construction site, adding water, and hauling it in wheelbarrows. These houses are literally made out of the dirt that surrounds them!
Fired bricks are still soft by American standards, but houses built with fired bricks can withstand the dangerous floods, whereas the mud brick houses can collapse. About 26,000 are affected by floods every rainy season, but this past January, there was a devastating flood in southern Malawi that killed several hundred people, and displaced 638,000 people (I don't know if this even made the news in the US). Farmland was washed away, leaving people that scrape a meager living off of the land without home, tools, or means to grow food to eat.
After lunch under a massive baobab tree (without leaves or fruit during the dry season), we visit a local school. The dark classrooms were packed full of kids, with not enough teachers to go around. One class may consist of 60, 80, or even 100 kids. Education is required by the government, but many children are not able to go. One reason kids don't attend school is that their family is so poor they can not afford to buy their children pencils and a notebook. Another deterrence from school is needing to help carry water (where there are not nearby wells), or during the rainy season, children living in thatch-roofed houses cannot attend because they cannot keep their books dry.
One of the highlights of building is being able to spend a day immersed in a village, surrounded by the sights and sounds of daily life. While the conversations and singing are in a language foreign to our ears, we recognize the universal language of children laughing and playing, babies crying, and roosters crowing. By the end of the day, we are physically and emotionally tired, and ready to return to our lodge (albeit in the midst of a brownout) for a time of reflection and relaxation.
House # 1, at the end of our first day of construction.
Here's a few more pictures from our day:
Music recorded from a song and dance performed for us by girls at the local school.
Today we traveled from the capital of Malawi, Lilongwe, to the rural area of Salima. On the way we visited the Habitat Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) project in Salima (you can learn more about the OVC program in Day 5's post). Visiting another village (and of course seeing the children) was the highlight of my day. After the customary greeting by a group of women singing and dancing, flocked by a group of children, we crowded into the local Community Based Organization's (CBO) office to learn how Habitat Malawi works hand-in-hand with the CBO.
One of the biggest questions in my mind about Habitat International's work in one of the poorest countries in the world, especially after visiting several villages yesterday, is this: How does Habitat Malawi select families for housing?To an outsider, it seems that every family in the village fits the "Need for adequate housing" criteria, which is also one of the qualifications for selecting partner families in the US. With such a daunting need for safe and decent housing in Malawi, where does one even begin?
In Malawi, 78% of families live in substandard housing; only 22% of the population lives in "Permanent houses."
What does "substandard" housing look like in Malawi?
A nice 3-room "Semi-Permanent" home (left), built by Habitat,
replacing the family's "Traditional house" (right)
34% live in Semi-Permanent houses (hand-made fired bricks, cement floor, iron sheet roof).
"Traditional" Malawian house
44% live in Traditional houses (hand-made un-fired bricks (walls made of mud), dirt floor, and grass thatched roof).
A typical home
Through interviewing a number of local village residents, we heard firsthand what "inadequate" means. I should preface this with the fact that in Malawi there are 2 seasons, the rainy season, and the dry season (we are there during the long dry season, thus why many of the trees are without leaves, and the land looks like a desert).
Some of the real challenges living with a grass thatched roof and dirt floor is that during the rainy season, the rain comes right through the thatch, meaning the floor upon which the family sleeps turns into mud. And with little to no ventilation in many houses, this brings major health problems. And with major storms or especially natural disasters, it's not uncommon for the "Traditional" homes to have their roofs collapse, or worse.
What really hit home for me is the fact that substandard housing keeps children from attending school, because during the rainy season they can't keep their school books dry.
CBO Office
So again I return to the question, How does Habitat Malawi select partner families? This is where the CBO comes in.
The Community Based Organization is made up completely of volunteers, and their board is made up of representatives from each village (in this case 7-8 villages). The CBO works directly with the village chiefs and other leaders, and it is the village leaders that identify to the CBO where the biggest needs are.
The CBO interviews and tracks data of the local people, so they know how many orphans there are in each village, how many children attend school, how many people are affected by HIV, Aids, or Tuberculosis, etc. The CBO also helps facilitate and track a micro-finance / bank program, where members can learn how to save up money for larger expenditures, as well as apply for a small loan to repair their home (buy glass for a window or sheet metal for the roof, for example), or funding to help start a small business.
Herein lies the answer to Family and program Selection -- The CBO uses resources in the local community to identify who is really poor or has the greatest need for more adequate housing. In addition to the Habitat Malawi housing program, through the CBO and local community leaders, Habitat asks the question: What are the greatest needs in the community? It is through the needs identified by the community that Habitat Malawi designs programs beyond just home construction. Other Habitat Malawi programs include: water sanitation, Malaria prevention training, HIV prevention training, vocational skills training, and property and inheritance rights training. And Habitat Malawi also finds other local partner organizations and funding sources to help address these needs.
Because the community recommends the partner families to Habitat, the community supports the selection process and celebrates along with the families when they move into their new homes. An additional asset to note -- Habitat Malawi has one Field Officer who lives in every village in which Habitat has built / is building, which also helps provide the eyes and ears, and ongoing Habitat presence within these villages.
The more I see and experience the immense need within villages in Malawi, the more questions I seem to have about how we can help. But at least today I came away with one definitive answer!
-- Jon Schack
Music from devotions with our team and Habitat Malawi staff
We are Alora and Kaylee. We do not like the substandard housing that exists in Barron and throughout the world. These houses represent our interst in construction of simple, decent homes. Please consider this when you are in a position to support housing.
As we arrive in the village for our second day of construction, our bus is surrounded once again by 
Because our Global Village trip has a strong focus on education, not just construction, we had the wonderful opportunity to spend additional time with the Habitat Malawi staff. Amos, the Executive Director, joined us on the build site numerous times. The first time I happened to notice that Amos was on site, I saw him down in the pit, digging with the pickax to make the mortar. Another time when I saw Amos "in the pit," he was having caring conversation with the partner family. Amos is a wonderful example to us of a servant-leader. 
