In 2000 Habitat for Humanity celebrated its 25th anniversary and completed its 100,000th house, with a goal of completing its next 100,000 by 2005. Dwayne Hunn recently completed his first overseas Habitat home building project. This is a section from a larger magazine submission.

They drove through Higgorakuda’s streets buzzing with people, cars and carts, viewed acres of lush greenery, rice fields, flowers and birds; passed over the temporary, one lane, steel bridge, which waited for the larger, adjacent, rusting steel and concrete bridge to resume construction; and looked down on the river’s most prominent flat rock, on which a smiling couple was always scrubbing clothes.

They followed the man made canals flowing from the smartly engineered tank capturing water on tens of thousands of hectares. From their first drive along the canals, the myriad of bathers, clothes washers, water gathers and swimmers seemed to know, turn and acknowledge their coming. A little bridge took them over the canal and into the jungle where simple houses were sparsely spaced. Lining and crossing the miles of dirt road was a perfectly shaped 18” x 8” trench. During their three-week sweaty vacation, white PVC pipe to carry the villagers’ first potable water would be dropped into these villagers’ perfectly carved hand dug trenches.

That first day they got out of the vans and stepped onto a dirt path lined with villagers and white shirted, scared children, holding pan leaves in tiny hands. Timidly, music and singing started. With coaxing, the singing grew louder. Soon a boy, well below the 6 footer’s waist, looking fearful, stood before him. As the boy went to his knees, the American dropped to his and held the boy’s little hands to stand him up. Trying to kiss his feet watered the yank’s eyes beyond the level of respect the kiss was to signify.

Pretty little girls gently and languidly danced and softly sang as the children guided the eleven Americans to a ceremony at the site where one of two Habitat homes would be built in Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka. After the first few days of work, the children were no longer scared. They mimicked the work the villagers and Americans did, once again proving children could do as well as adults, just couldn’t reach as high. They shyly plied for attention, as the ever-polite Sri Lankans watched, so that the children wouldn’t become the pests they were too beautiful to be. Maybe Polonnanruwa was an exceptional village, but had these kids been transplanted into any American suburb, they would stand tall among its exceptional, most lovable kids.

“Wasn’t 16 red bricks in that barrow your tops yesterday? Dave, the ex-college halfback, asked of the 6’ 200 pound ex-college pulling guard.

“Yeah,” he said, as they stopped their sweaty work to watch the tall, bony, shoeless lady push the dilapidated, rickety, undersized wheel barrow filled with 20 bricks from the brick making area thirty yards away, around trees, and over the path intermixed with stones and loose sand. “Isn’t that the lady we saw working yesterday?”

“Yes… She’s something. Who is she?”

“Chandra Latha is her name,” Habitat organizer Rohita told us before he took us to her home. “It is understood that if a Habitat house is built for you, you help others when they build one, if you can. Chandra always helps as much as she can. She is a very helping person.”

Chandra’s red brick, 9’ x 20’ house, like the two we built, had two doors, one window and was one-half of a potentially double in size A frame if the owners are able to cover another $350-400 in costs. Although Chandra couldn’t speak English and had her worn down look on, she still seemed excited to show her home. The best corner of her house was for her ten year old. When it was time to leave, she rushed back in to carry him into our photo of her house and family. Her son, unable to brush the flies away as he lay on his blanket, had been a lifelong victim of perhaps polio. Chandra’s other son, about 20 and recently married, joined the picture. Like his mother, he had no steady job or skill, other than the seasonal planting and picking of rice.

Every day when you drove back by the waving kids, through the jungle, hand dug trenches, busy canal, rice fields, under-construction bridge you had someone like Chandra to remember.