Thierry Falise/OnAsia/ActionAid
"It looked easy, but keeping the mortar on the brick was no mean feat - most of it ended up on my boots"
Alexandra Ferguson
04/04/2008
Alexandra Ferguson helps locals to build a new community centre in Cambodia with ActionAid.
Danger! Mines! Beyond the skull-and-crossbones sign, the red and white tapes fanned out through the long grass. In the still heat of the afternoon, chickens scratched beneath a banana palm, a woman filled a jerrycan at a well and two children creaked past on an oversized bicycle.
Kim Sros splashed water into the makeshift hollow and we dragged our shovels back and forth, mixing the sand and cement. On the scaffolding behind us, two villagers added a row of bricks to a side wall, while two volunteers, Graham and Sally, rendered the front elevation in sweeping arcs.
We stopped to stretch. "The community centre will make a real difference to Soksan," 19-year-old Kim, the village's representative, said through an interpreter.
"Before, we had nowhere to meet. Sometimes we would go to the pagoda, but in the rainy season we always got wet. Now we will have a place to teach pre-school children and hold health checks and training workshops. We are very excited."
I was in Cambodia with the charity ActionAid, working on a building project shared between local villagers and volunteers from Britain.
Banteay Meanchey province, on the Thai border, was one of the last strongholds of the Khmer Rouge, whose regime was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians in slave-labour camps and torture centres in the late 1970s. Although the regime fell in 1979, fighting continued here until 1998.
The displaced population ekes out a living from farming rice in fields riddled with landmines; there is little infrastructure; and the average family survives on less than 50p a day.
ActionAid has been working with local NGOs to combat poor health, land loss and illiteracy since 1999. Cambodia has about 40,000 amputees and the highest HIV rates in Asia. Malaria, diarrhoeal diseases and dengue fever are additional concerns in Banteay Meanchey.
The sale of land to fund health care is common and the lack of formal land titles makes the poor vulnerable to land grab. With no source of food or income, people cross the border to find work and more than half of all school-age children work to supplement the family income. Child trafficking and domestic violence are other pressing problems.
Chantara Kimsan, an ActionAid programme officer, was working with the team at Soksan. "Often it is hard to see the results of our work because we are passing on knowledge," he said.
"But this is how change begins. We are looking for long-term solutions and this centre will be used by about 400 people."
Two further centres – funded by the volunteers – were under way in the nearby villages of Koh Snuol and Santepheap, although heavy rain had halted work at the latter.
The extra British muscle was welcome and our lack of building skills no obstacle. Among the 21 volunteers, aged from 21 to 69, only Seb – a brickie from Bristol – had any professional expertise. Everyone here had raised at least £3,300 to take part: a minimum of £1,855 for the centres, plus £1,445 to cover flights and ground costs.
Unlike the average charity trek, this project had the volunteers working alongside the people benefiting from their sponsorship and we could see how the cash was being spent. After the building work, a sightseeing trip to the temples of Angkor was in prospect.
Poipet, our base for the five-day build, was a dusty border town an hour from the building sites. Run-down hotels and market stalls lined a central square dominated by a Khmer statue. A few yards farther on the asphalt petered out and the potholes – big enough to swallow an elephant – began.
Our hotel receptionist was overwhelmed by the influx of guests, as was the plumbing. Later that evening, in varying states of cleanliness, we talked about our fundraising efforts.
The past few months had been a whirl of car-boot sales, garden fêtes, sponsored runs and tombolas. "I was up at 7am every day, baking scones," said Elizabeth, an assistant postmistress.
Gordon, a professor of education, strong-armed friends with the tag line "Stobart finally does something practical", while Susan, a BA flight supervisor, had won The Weakest Link.
What was it about this project that had caught their imagination? Ryan, a health worker, said he had always wanted to visit Cambodia, "and this seemed like a great opportunity to help people and see the sights".
"I love being outdoors, working with my hands," said Andrew from London. "ActionAid has the right approach, getting the locals involved and keeping them central to everything."
The first day had left a big impression: "You're not encountering anything that you do not already know on an intellectual level," said Barbara, a publisher. "But seeing it – the real subsistence, the precariousness of their lives – is something else." Her words returned to me the next morning when I joined the other half of the group, bound for Koh Snuol.
Having left what passes for the main highway, we bounced down a rutted track through paddy fields and dense pampas grass. It was late November – harvest time – and men and women toiled in the fields.
Children played beside bamboo shacks patched with sacking and corrugated iron; a young amputee laboured through the dust on home-made crutches. We came to a slow-moving creek hemmed by stilt homes; rubbish littered its banks. We inched across the rickety wooden bridge, scattering loose planks, and pushed deeper into the bush, skirting a squat schoolhouse ringed by bicycles before pulling into a clearing.
Unlike the building at Soksan, the two-storey centre at Koh Snuol was little more than a skeleton of concrete posts and bare timbers.
The locals were already hard at work. Our building manager, Anthony, consulted the foreman – a slight, muscular man in flip-flops – while we donned hard hats and steel-capped boots. The floors had to be laid and, after safety briefings, we began the laborious business of shifting several tons of hardcore by hand in baskets. A stream of local men, women and children swelled our numbers.
Some of the group turned to bricklaying; others mixed cement. The simplicity of our tasks allowed us to chat and even try out a few words of Khmer on the bemused Cambodians. They had never met Westerners before and our size intrigued them. John – the tallest at 6ft 5in – drew shy glances. We plastered on sunscreen and insect repellent, even though there was a cool breeze. By midday the heat was intense and we retreated to the shade.
After lunch, Seb gave me a lesson in the art of bricklaying. Having applied the mortar with two deft strokes, he grounded the brick with a swift wiggle and tap of the trowel handle. It looked easy, but keeping the mortar on the brick was no mean feat – most of it ended up on my boots.
After a few false starts, I was soon worrying about my perps – perpendiculars – and horizontals, following the guide string in concentration.
Gordon applied himself with equal gusto to the adjacent wall. He had already completed several rows. He stood back to survey his handiwork: "I've got a bit of a Gaudà effect going on here," he chuckled. "Lots of wavy lines!" His horizontals looked fine to me.
Behind us, the others levelled the floor. A length of hosepipe stretched along the perimeter acted as a rudimentary spirit level, the water marking the incline below the raised cut ends. The hi-tech tamping tools were logs mounted on two slender branches.
The dull thud of wood on stone kept time as the sun scorched a path through the sky and at 4.30pm we downed tools for the day.
With so many pairs of hands, we had made good progress. The first-floor women's refuge still required a little imagination, but the ground-floor layout – with separate rooms for literacy classes and Aids awareness, a women's clinic and village meetings – was clear.
I met Chheang Eang, a women's health worker, at her modest home the next day. Chosen by her peers, she had received six weeks' training from ActionAid.
Encouraging women to seek help was her first task, because, culturally, they are very shy. Having a dedicated, private room in the centre would help and simple health education – especially about HIV and Aids – would save lives.
"Before, I did not know how to protect my own and my daughter's health," she told me. "Now I do, and I can help other women, too."
The wall chart behind her was a stark reminder of the continuing threat from landmines: they come in all shapes and sizes, all devastating. Since the area was cleared the number of incidents had fallen, but their legacy remained: the widow raising a family of seven, the farmer who had lost a leg, the village elder blinded by shrapnel.
But this community is looking to the future with a real sense of hope and purpose and, as the week progressed, and the walls at Koh Snuol grew higher, our conviction deepened. Fitness levels varied, so we set our own pace and selected our tasks. Our language skills did not improve much, but there was a great deal of laughter. Somehow it worked: we became a team.
The same seemed to be true at the Soksan site. In the evenings we traded stories over steaming bowls of noodles and obscure local beers. The bricklaying was complete at the first site, the rendering almost finished and work had started on a retaining wall.
At Koh Snuol, there was still much to do, but we had made great strides. The villagers of Santepheap would have to wait for the ground to dry out before building could resume, but funding was secure. ActionAid is committed to overseeing the community centres for the next seven years and each village will elect a management committee.
As the build drew to a close, it was hard to know who had gained more from the experience: the locals or the volunteers. "It's the best thing I've ever done!" Ryan said. "It has been physically strenuous but working with the local people has been really special."
Barbara summed it up: "You can make a significant physical contribution. Who'd have thought that 21 people who had never done this before could achieve so much?"
On the final afternoon, we gathered for farewells. The village elders thanked us and the children presented us with drawings. A little girl with huge almond eyes pressed her palms together in silent greeting and handed me a piece of paper.
The centre was there in bright crayon strokes. There were no landmines or crutches, just flowers and a family and a purple rabbit. Above it all was a smiling sun.
- ActionAid's next Cambodia community challenge will take place in November. It is also planning community builds in Nepal and South Africa in 2009. To join, a registration fee of £300 is needed plus a minimum sponsorship target.
- For further information on ActionAid's community challenges, see www.actionaid.org.uk/adventures
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