Yunnan with Habitat for Humanity

Halloween weekend Ben and I went to a small village, Ganhaizi, in Yunnan Province to work on a Habitat for Humanity project. The trip was interesting, although of perhaps somewhat questionable value (more on that later).

Day 1 started with a mid-day flight to Kunming, capital of Yunnan, China's southwestern-most province.

About 15 of us (mostly US Embassy personnel and/or spouses) gathered at the Kunming airport for the 4+ hour drive north to Shilata, the tiny town where we stayed in a primitive, concrete guest house with a single "squatty-potty" for the lot of us and no showers. Here is our room:

From Shilata, it was about a 45 minute hike to Ganhaizi. We were warmly welcomed on the first morning by a group of villagers who sang us into the village.

Our welcome was the only thing warm about the morning. It was chilly, damp and muddy. Nevertheless, we were eager to get to work. Ganhaizi is a village of Miao people. It was visited at some indeterminate time in the past by Korean missionaries and since then the people of the village have been practicing Christians. The church is the most substantial building in the village and it was there we deposited our things to keep them dry while we set off to work.

Our assignment for the day was to finish digging out and leveling the ground for the foundation of the house. Despite the weather we went to work with a will and made quite good progress over the course of the morning.

Our tools were primitive. We had hoes, hand woven baskets for carting dirt, one shovel and a pick-axe to help with the hardest patches. Although the weather grew progressively worse over the course of the morning, we managed to nearly double the cleared area before the rain drove us to take shelter in the neighboring house. After just a few minutes in the building, it was clear why new homes were so critical. The house we sheltered in was of rammed earth construction - basically a dirt floor, packed dirt walls and a few wooden beams supporting a very leaky tile roof. The house was heated by an open fire in the middle of the floor of the main room. With no chimney or smoke hole, the only outlets for the smoke were the poorly covered doorway and the gaps between the roof and the walls. It was almost unbearably smoky inside. We were grateful when we were summoned to lunch which the villagers had prepared for us. Lunch consisted of rice, french fries, a tomato and tofu dish, cabbage and a bit of chicken (unfortunately not the rooster that crowed all night every night!).

By the time lunch was over it was raining too hard for it to be feasible to continue work on the house. After some discussion, our Habitat host finally arranged with the villagers for us to help them with an important autumn task, the preparation of the feed that would keep their pigs alive through the winter. Pigs in Yunnan eat corn during the winter. The villagers grow the corn, harvest it, allow it to partially dry by hanging it in bundles from every conceivably place, then remove the kernels from the ears and finish drying them. All of the work must be done by hand and we all developed blisters from the remarkably difficult task of removing the stubborn kernels from the ears.

I have a sneaking suspicion that one villager could have cleaned as many ears of corn that afternoon as all 15 of us together managed. Even so, we felt as if we'd put in a good day's work and were pretty exhausted by the end of the cold, damp hike back to Shilata. Some people even managed to sleep through the rooster's crowing that night.

Unfortunately, the next morning the weather had deteriorated further and we faced a serious decision. Return to the village and go back to work despite the weather (even the villagers thought we were pretty crazy for having worked the preceding day), or declare the weather to be untenable and return early to Kunming. Several people had urgent work to return to in Beijing and were eager to get home a day earlier than anticipated, but we all felt an obligation to try to do the work we'd come to do. After much debate we finally decided that we would work in Ganhaizi in the morning, but return to Shilata in the early afternoon and take the bus back to Kunming that evening. Those who were eager to get home could fly out on the late flight to Beijing and the rest of us would stay over in Kunming. A few people decided for various reasons not to make the trek to the village and were appointed to arrange the flight changes, hotels, etc.

The rest of us bundled up and set off. We arrived in Ganhaizi to find that our new assignment was to move a heap of bricks. We organized an assembly line to hand the bricks from the top of the hill down, to a pile at the bottom and got to work. I would estimate that we moved about a thousand bricks over the course of about 2 1/2 hours. That may not sound like so much, but those bricks are heavy! I was certainly feeling it by the end. Although we didn't manage to move all the bricks, we did make quite a dent.

We joined the villagers for an early lunch, then were treated to a brief performance by the church choir before heading back to Shilata and on towards home.



Although we worked hard and the work was clearly appreciated. We left with somewhat mixed feelings about its true value. While I think Habitat is, in general, a fantastic organization, I am not sure that whoever plans international resource usage fully understands how things work here in China. We began to doubt what we were doing on the afternoon of the first day when we stopped in to see the house that last year's trip had worked on. A year after they were there, it remained an unoccupied brick shell with no doors or windows. Another house from earlier years had one of six rooms occupied with the remaining also unfinished, vacant spaces. Of the 200 or so people counted in the population of the village, I don't think more than 40 were actually present when we were there. Most of the working-age adults had likely moved to a major city where they can earn far more than what they would earn from subsistence farming in their home village. Due to Chinese system of residence records, all of those people are recorded as residents of the village even if they spend only a few weeks a year there, or less. While the solid Habitat houses are clearly a vast improvement over the rammed-earth huts typical of that part of China, it is not so clear that they will ever really be lived in. Although it was satisfying to see our accomplishments, and the villagers clearly appreciated that we were there, I am left to wonder whether the Habitat for Humanity might find a higher-impact way to put its resources to use in China.

Worn out in Beijing...off for a shower (now that hot water is finally back!).