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| The team with the Filipino workers |
If you think that "habitat" sounds familiar, then you're probably right. This Nehemiah Team partners with Habitat for Humanity, the well-known organization that provides housing for people all over the world. The team here works with Habitat directly, but they also have the NT ministry on their minds.
The team is led by O'Neal, and includes Jeremy, Hagen, Austin, Brent and Joal, the Filipino. They've been working in a project in Cagayan De Oro, a huge city in northcentral Mindanao. I took a six-hour bus ride over the mountains of the island to catch up with the team.
As you might expect, they've been hard at work. They've contributed to the building of over 20 houses this summer. The team works alongside the same team of Filipino workers every day, and this team is their main ministry. The house-building process is streamlined- on a single row of houses, you could see more than ten in the process of being built, all at different levels. The houses are made of hollow cinderblock and framed with rebar, topped with a tin roof. The inside is about a 15 x 15 foot area, and is high enough to allow a loft to be built. Every house is painted the same colors as the others in its row.
The team does a lot of what you might call grunt work- They make cement, move blocks to the work site, lift cement and blocks to the men on the scaffolding, paint, and move dirt. The Filipinos do some more of the complex work of welding the rebar, laying and filling the blocks and placing the roof on. The workdays are Monday through Friday, starting around 8, and ending closer to 4. While you can get shade inside the houses, you mostly work outside in the sun. A common Cebuano phrase of greeting everyone uses is "init kaayo", which means "very hot." Indeed, every day is hot hard work, tiring even with the afternoon siesta break.
But in terms of hard work, there's no better team. It seems like every day the guys challenge each other subconsciously to work harder. Who can dig more dirt, lift more bags of cement or 100-plus pound chunks of coral is the unsung battle cry of sorts. Even the Filipinos join in on the fun, making jokes about how huge the team members are compared to the nationals.
All in all, it's been a hard-working summer.
Pray for the team's strength as they work one last week before heading back to Butuan City.
-Brian & the Habitat Team
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| 'Backfillng,' in which you move dirt dug from the foundation back into the house to level the floor for a cement floor to placed on top of. |
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| Lunch: usually PB&J, but also could include cold canned meat and bread alongside a Cobra energy drink. |
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| Row of occupied Habitat homes |
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| This chunk of coral isn't an unusual sight in the soil; the housing project is only a few hundred yards from the ocean. |
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| They decided to move these chunks inside the house to level the floor. |
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| Unfortunately the coral chunks had to be removed from the inside of the house because they were too big. |
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| About 150 houses were being built in this project. |
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| hollow cinder blocks, made by the home owners for 1 peso each. |
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| Sifting the dirt to create the smooth finishing plaster for the walls. |
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| Yes, the man up top is welding in flip flops and cheap sunglasses. |
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| Mixing cement |
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| The t-shirt around the head is common place; here in the Philippines nobody actually wants to get darker. |