Building hope after disaster: volunteering your construction skills

Following the devastation of the Boxing Day Tsunami the house building industry responded generously. The charity Habitat for Humanity approached members of the industry to launch the First Builders Initiative, which aimed to bring together groups of eight to ten volunteers to spend a week in Sri Lanka helping to rebuild destroyed homes.

Re-constructing a Sri Lankan family's house

I was part of a team of eight women and one man who travelled to Sri Lanka to work with the Desilva family on their new home. Vinal Desilva was a fisherman whose boat had been washed away in the tidal wave. As a seamstress, his wife Nedika’s livelihood was also destroyed when her sewing machine was swept away. With two young children to support they urgently needed safety and shelter. When we arrived the scale of devastation apparent in Sri Lanka was immense. Tented villages had sprung up amongst the debris of discarded clothing and building remnants. Despite the atrocity of this event, we had to overcome our feelings of sadness in order to do as much as possible to help.

Despite the atrocity of this event, we had to overcome our feelings of sadness to do as much as we could to help.

Each group was placed with an experienced site supervisor to oversee health and safety and the technicalities of the building process. The team was comprised of people with a mixture of competencies from little or no experience, to practised site managers. Once we had seen the extent of the damage we really understood why we were there and were keen to set to work on the house. As a group we definitely bonded over the experience to become friends for life.

Volunteering: a life-changing experience

I recommend volunteering for construction relief work to anyone and am certain that all those in my team would say the same. It’s a life-changing experience. If you don’t want to work hard though, it’s not for you. We laboured for up to 13-hours a day in scorching temperatures but the sense of achievement is immense. Knowing that your time and effort will make such a difference to people’s lives is incentive enough to want to leave feeling that you couldn’t possibly have done more.