Building Houses, Building Hope in Sri Lanka
By Vivian Claire Liu,
ACCT Team Member

“Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders labor in vain”
 

How often do we truly set aside time to help our fellow humans?
 
7 months on, many tsunami survivors remain homeless even as the urgency of rebuilding recedes from the public eye. To address their needs and to catalyse the mission outreach of Catholics in Singapore, the Archdiocese Crisis Coordination Team (ACCT) is partnering with Habitat for Humanity to build houses for Tsunami victims.
 
The first group of 11 volunteers, led by Kathleen Kwan, a catholic and board member of Habitat went to build houses at Thotagamuwa, a village in the south of Sri Lanka from 15 to 23rd July 2005. Building construction costs were mainly sponsored by the Lien Foundation. As volunteers, we paid for our own cost of going.
 

Prior to the trip, we had several briefings on the spirituality of missions, trip parameters and basic Sinhalese words, from the ACCT Volunteers & Mission team, together with two other teams who will be undertaking the trip in August.
 
We arrived late at night in Colombo, stayed overnight, and took a 5 hour bus ride down to Galle the next day. We descended Sunday morning on the village of Thotagamuwa, where we were to work on 3 houses-in-progress. Work was to begin on Monday, but we wanted to get a sense of the job site and prepare ourselves for the various tasks.
 
Over the next week, we sawed roof beams, tiled roofs, sifted sand, mixed cement, plastered walls, dug toilet pits, and painted the houses. Of course, we were supervised by a local foreman and a few professional craftsmen. It was immensely heartening to see the houses take shape before our eyes.
 
It was a lot of fun learning to saw and sift and plaster, and we soon acquainted ourselves with the trowels and wheelbarrows. Some people even took their work so seriously that we started hearing about "my wall" and "my roof". Our work left an indelible mark; we would never look at a roof or even a pile of sand in the same way again. Nor will simple noodles and sandwiches ever taste as scrumptious as they did during our lunches there.
 

But more important than the physical labour (and process improvements) we provided, was the solidarity demonstrated by our simple presence. We all came from diverse backgrounds and learnt a lot from each other and the trip.
 
Willie Cheng (ACCT Convenor) came with his wife, Julie and we saw couple power in action. Josephine Lee (Net Evangelization Team) persevered at learning plastering till the local professional asked for her to do all his other plastering work. Tey Lian Lee and Jonathon Khoo who came from NTUC Fairprice’s volunteer group lived up the image of their employer’s "supermarket with a heart". 
 
We were very fortunate to have with us Fr David Garcia, a Dominican priest, who helped us spiritually, not just through the daily mass and his homily, but also in his deeds and his example.  Michael Smith, an American scuba instructor, who vied with Fr David for doing the most hard labor, also worked the longest hours, staying at the village for a day longer.
 
Our team also included Jack Sim, founder of World Toilet Organization (WTO). Through him and the visiting sanitation experts from WTO, we learnt about everything we never knew about toilets. More than that, Jack was the livewire of the party and regaled us with many stories beyond toilets.
 

My mentality towards our housebuilding mission matured significantly. I had viewed this as an opportunity to help restore one of the basic human needs to these people. I ran into Chandupa, a 1-year-old who merrily crawled out from under the fence around his house and held out his hands to be carried. Such is the grace of God that even the loss of his grandmother and an aunt has not broken his trust in the goodness of life. Chandupa’s family is not a beneficiary of our Habitat building as they have their own place, but at a terrible price -- his father works in Saudi Arabia and only comes home every 2 years. But looking at him gurgle with joy at the strains of Ave Maria, all these seemed so far away.
 
It wasn't all work; delays in materials shipments afforded us the opportunity to visit a Catholic orphanage for special children one afternoon. We also treasured the moments of bonding as villagers shared about their families.
 
We also combined the housebuilding mission with due diligence on proposed and funded projects by the ACCT. Trip members led by Willie, met with the Archbishop of Colombo to better understand the needs of the archdiocese, and visited the pre-school of Kalutara parish, whose reconstruction ACCT will be funding. The Jesuit Refugee Services (JRS) supervisor in Sri Lanka also took time to brief us on their various projects.
 
God chose each one of us for this trip, and blessed us with the health and the means to stand in solidarity with His children. It was a privilege to be there, and our duty to help the less fortunate. Not just for them, but for our own character development and spiritual maturity. For most in the team, it was the first taste of village life; for a few, a walk down memory lane throbbing with personal resonance. We could only begin to appreciate the challenges that these people face in finding dignity and purpose in such upheaval, and pray that we could do more for them. But God can work wonders even with insufficient means. May what little we’ve done, make a difference towards bringing our brothers and sisters closer to Him, and light to their lives.
 

ACCT team in Sri Lanka, July 2005