A few months ago I was introduced to a family being evicted from their house. The father has a heart condition preventing him from working and the mother and two daughters have a rare genetic disorder causing them all, to slowly go blind. Both parents unable to work and make payments, their Land Lord began the process of evicting them.
Lanka Habitat decided to take action and construct them a new one. Unfortunately they are bound to give out low interest loans only, the organization is more of a self help program than a charity, and so they couldn't fund construction directly. Instead they searched for corporate and civilian sponsorship with the help of a local church to fund construction as they went.
Three times I've gone to that build site, the first time we dug the foundation, the second mixed concrete for the flooring, and the third climbed on top of the house to tile the roof.
The last day i enjoyed particularly. I've always loved heights and climbing, furthermore roof tiling is a
new challenge i've never undertaken before. I also found it interesting learning how the tiles are designed to interconnect in a watertight seal, the design is pretty brilliant, and it doesn't surprise me 90% of the houses i see make use of this exact same tiles.
To finish the entire roof in one day working collaboratively with others was particularly important. Instead of climbing up and down with tiles we started a supply chain where a man on the ground would throw tiles to a second person on the roof, who would form pass the tiles to a third man to form orderly stacks at regular intervals for a fifth and sixth person to slot together.
It took a while to perfect the system but by the end we ran like a well oiled machine and by showing perseverance we managed to tile the entire roof two hours early giving us time to work briefly on the flooring some more.
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