Today I did something that was perhaps one of the most ethically challenging things I have done here. It wasn’t something that most Americans would have a problem with at all. I went into a township and helped build a house with an Irish nonprofit. People go on Habitat for Humanity building projects all the time in the United States. Being here was very different, but also very much the same. It has kind of reshaped my perceptions of even Habitat for Humanity building projects in the States. Before I get into my thoughts, I want to start at the beginning of my day.
When our bus arrived at the building company, we were one of the later groups there and were rushed in and given T shirts to wear. They pretty quickly began calling out teams and splitting us up. Our group was supposed to be split up and paired with other students from South Africa on the project. This worked out well for most people, but they had inadvertently crossed off my name and so I wasn’t placed in one of the teams with anyone from Stanford. I waited until the end when I went up to the front and was sent off with a group that included no one from the United States. This was definitely a blessing in disguise as I didn’t have the opportunity to stick with people I knew; I was forced to engage with people from different cultures.
My group was quite diverse. In it we had a family of adults who were coloured, several white South Africans, a group of Germans, as well as a small group of black women who actually live in Khayelitsha, the township I work in with Philani. I quickly made friends with the coloured family and one of the women from Khayelitsha. We spent the morning mixing lots of cement and carrying cement blocks to the building site while several skilled laborers placed the bricks. While we were working we had a bunch of interesting conversations with the other people in our group. I was talking with a coloured woman about how expensive the tickets for the World Cup are for South Africans. She said that she just couldn’t afford it. Though she has grown up in Cape Town, she hasn’t ever been to Robben Island or up to the top of Table Mountain because they are simply too expensive. I didn’t tell her that I had been to both of those places yesterday, but I definitely felt guilty about it. Here I am - just some rich American who can enjoy more of South Africa than locals simply because of financial reasons.
Our conversations wound between everything from what houses are like in the United States to relationships and favorite foods. It was fun to work with them for the day and get to know some people very who come from a much different background.
I had no problems with the people that I was with most of the day, but I definitely left questioning who this project is really about. We worked in the morning, stopped for lunch, and then for a little while in the afternoon as well. Both of the sessions were broken up by the directors bringing popsicles and candy around to the sites which caused everyone to stop working for a period of 15 minutes while we ate. In addition, it seemed like our large groups were actually slowing down the house-building. When we asked how long it normally took just the workers themselves to put up the houses, they told us that they could do one house in a day. Despite all of our efforts, we put up only about half of the house. Every time that one of the actual workers would take over one of the tasks we were doing, it would be done twice as quickly. When we left, we were required to take all of the tools from the building company leaving the workers (who didn’t leave when we did) with no tools to continue working on the house. We left a shovel with our group just because it didn’t seem fair to leave them with nothing, especially if they are being paid by the house-building company. Overall, it felt like this homebuilding project was being marketed for us, the homebuilders, and not for the community. One of the other people in our group was talking with one of the Xhosa speaking members of his group who overheard groups of people from the local community along the roads we walked on to the houses talking about us. He said that they didn’t understand why we were here and thought that we should go back where we came from. It didn’t seem like the organization really had much good contact with the community. It was mostly a group led from the top down with the mentality that ‘we are doing something good for you so you should just like us’ instead of actually allowing the community to be part of the work. On top of all my other frustrations, there was a fee charged for volunteers to work on the houses. Stanford paid for our work and got a discounted rate, but the charge is usually R1000 per person which is almost $150. To me, this seems like a scheme to raise money through volunteers for the purpose of executing a project which is not well accepted by the community.
Experiences like this really make you contemplate what it is really like to be a part of development work. Yes people in this community do need new houses, but is this really the right way to do it? I don’t think it is. What about the developmental tourism that I engaged in today? I don’t think that is the right way to do it either. You cannot just show up for a short period of time and expect to understand what the community really wants and needs. It is unrealistic to think that what I did today actually made a difference. The houses would have gone up just as quickly if I was not there. This experience today was about me, not about building a house or helping this community. Is a Habitat for Humanity build any different? Can someone with no real construction expertise hope to actually make a difference on the project and in the lives of a community?
The best laid plans of mice and men...It is unfortunate that human efforts to "do good" are often short-sighted or ineffective. I think you have good insight about the need to be closely integrated into a community to discover what they want and need...how best to be helpful. Extra manpower, even unskilled, can be useful when directed to tasks that are appropriate. CPC's Peru Team is an example, as is the Simsbury church's dental/microfinance trip. Both teams traveled to assist local operations that are already in progress, and were focused and directed to provide useful help. Some friends from Stanford started Servant Partners and Barnabas Ventures with similar ideas. In both, people move into urban poor communities internationally to learn and build relationships. Eventually they assist the communities in accomplishing goals that the communities have, partnering with outside resources when possible/necessary/helpful. And you've met our other Stanford friends who moved into East Palo Alto in the 1980s and formed Bayshore Christian Ministries which has grown to serve many in that community. And just a note about U.S. Habitat for Humanity...I did work on one of their projects in San Diego - it was a 1 week blitz that built 100 small homes in Tijuana and 5 homes in San Diego using mostly unskilled but well directed laborers. It was the biggest build of the year so there was a lot of publicity, and President Carter visited. In that sense, it was partially about the workers and the organization, but it also did a lot of building. Locally, South Church in Granby has volunteers who work with Habitat in Hartford on an ongoing basis.
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