Habitat Build !

On Saturday 25th of February I went on my first built for the new after school CAS group that i have joined this year. I volunteered along with four other students to go on Saturday morning at 7:30 to Negombo in order to help the community there building houses. After an hour’s drive we arrived at our destination. After a short breakfast at one of the local’s house we began working. At first I was placed in a group with Ahmad from grade 11 to help a local build the walls to a new room in his house. We worked for about 2 hours, sawing wood and hammering nails and completed 2 walls. At around 11 we left that group since there were too many workers in that sight so we weren’t really helping much towards the end. We joined the rest of the group and helped then destroy the floor to a house in order to fill it up with cement. The job which I found most challenging that day was carrying the buckets of cement from the mixing site to the room; in the mid-day sun combined with muscle ache and sandflies was actually challenging to stay concentrated on the work. We stayed working on the floor for the rest of the afternoon eventually leaving the building site at around 2:45.

Through this built I learned new skills, since I’ve never done construction work before as intense as this. The locals from my first site with Ahmad showed me how to saw a wooden plank correctly. In this built everyone was working collaboratively with each other. At one point the bucket was paced from person to person from the mixing site to the room in order to avoid harder labor. Although this built required me to wake up at 7 in the morning on a Saturday which is challenging for me, I would do the same over again as the day resulted to be quite fun.