Again, my selfish goal for this trip was to go “off-the-grid” and disconnect from the outside world. Oftentimes, we get so caught up in the hustle and bustle of our fast paced lives. It’s such a refreshing change to disconnect from it all and just be of one place and one mind.

 

Sustainable & Cost-Effective Building Materials in Sri Lanka

 

Building Clay Brick Houses in Sri Lanka

During the two-week trip, our team of volunteers helped six families with their homes.

The way the Habitat For Humanity program works in Sri Lanka is that families are given micro-loans to fund smaller house projects, not a large full house loan. Families receive funding for a new roof, a new room, new plaster, a new latrine, etc. Micro-loans are easier and quicker to repay. Once the loans are repaid, the homeowners can request another loan for a different project on their house.

Similar to the bamboo houses in Nepal, Sri Lankan houses are approximately 2-3 rooms and about 500sf. (Micro-loans make it possible to add more rooms.)

Because we were helping six different families, we split up into groups with 2-3 volunteers working at each house, and then rotated throughout the two weeks. We also gave names to each house to make it easy for us to keep them separate.

Since we weren’t building houses from the ground up, I’ll just share my building experiences at a few of the different houses.

 

Building a Brick Addition at the Lebanon House

The Lebanon House was a 2-room brick house with an outdoor kitchen area out back.

The Lebanon House was named after the mother, who had spent a few years in Lebanon working and sending money back to the family here in Sri Lanka.

The cute little boy who lived here loved to sing to us. 

When we started working at this house, the foundation walls were already poured and the first courses of brick were getting laid.

Within a few days, the brick walls were rising and the spaces started to become enclosed. And window and door openings were framed out of wood as bricks were laid higher and higer. I was even happy to see they centered the kitchen sink on a window opening. They planned a nice view for the person washing dishes. Great design move!

Occasionally holes were left in the walls to provide gaps for scaffolding to poke through. As work continued higher up, buckets of mortar was passed up to people working on the scaffolding. Same with the bricks. (You can imagine after a while how tiring this can get, lifting dense bricks and heavy buckets of mortar up over your head!)

After our time here, we had 3 full height brick walls. The homeowners just needed to frame the roof and add roof panels.

 

Knocking Down Walls & Expanding at the Mountain House

We dubbed this house the Mountain House because it sat at the base of a large mountain with terraced rice fields in the back yard. Every so often you would hear the trees rustle higher up the mountain from the elephants moving around. It always made me smile thinking about free roaming elephants.

(But on a serious note, many people in this area struggle with maintaining their rice fields because of the frequent migration of the elephants. They tromp through the rice fields  at night and destroy the crops. We learned that deforestation is starting to become a problem in the hill country here. Elephants have been forced out of their forested habitat and are trying to find refuge.)

The Mountain House was a two-room house made of mostly mud and sticks with a metal roof. The family requested a micro loan to expand their house and replace some existing exterior wall to make way for a larger room.

You can see in the photo the terrible state of their mud walls. I was really happy I could help this family replace some of those walls. This house ended up being my favorite house to work at on the whole trip.

After the concrete cured for one day( ! ), we started laying clay brick. We also demolished the existing exterior walls now instead of waiting until after the walls were completely built. This let us remove all the existing wall debris from the area by just tossing it over the short (new) brick walls instead of having to walk around them later if we waited to demo. It would have been a lot of extra, unneccesary trips had we waited.

The photo belows shows us demolishing the walls. (Its hard to explain, but knocking these walls down was a real mental victory for us. We were getting rid of the bad and replacing it with good.)

Then we just continued to mix mortar and lay brick, building the walls higher and higher. The process was very similar to that at Lebanon house. I think I’m an expert mason now. (Anyone need any low-tech clay brick houses built?)

Similar to the progress at the Lebanon house, here, we also were able to build the walls full height. So all that was needed was roof framing.

 

 

Plastering Walls & Pouring Concrete Floors at the Diva House

The Diva House, so named after a cute little 3-year-old girl who lived there. She was a Diva, sassy and entertaining.

This house had three rooms of all brick walls and dirt floors. The family needed help plastering the walls and pouring concrete floors.

To make the plaster, we had to mix sand, cement, and water. Sand was delivered by truck to the edge of the road. We had to use saucer-shaped pans to carry sand from the road up to the house where we sifted it to remove larger pebbles and rocks. With the back and forth motion of the sifting, our arms got pretty tired.

Once we had a large pile of sifted sand, we mixed it with cement and water by shovel to create the plaster mixture.

Then, the plaster was carried by the same saucer pans to each room and spread over the existing clay brick walls. A long wooden stick was lightly grazed over the plaster to check for thickness consistency.

Mixing concrete for the concrete floors was a similar process to mixing plaster, except that the sand didn’t need to be sifted. (Thank goodness!) Sand was mixed with cement and water, and this time also mixed with gravel.

Again, concrete was shoveled into saucer pans and carried to each room where it was poured onto the dirt floor.

Many batches of concrete later, and many many trips of carrying concrete saucers, the concrete floor was a smooth, brushed surface.

 

 

Raising the Roof at the Celebration House

The Celebration House was the house that saw the most progress during our two-week stay. We were to help build a new front room AND replace the roof of the whole house.

In the first photo, you can see in the background the foundation for the new brick room with a few starter courses and a wooden door frame.

Within no time, we were laying brick all the way up the wall and even angled the top brick courses to form a ridge at the roof level. We were expert masons at this point, of course!

You can also see in the background of one of photos that the roof was removed from the existing house.

Corrugated metal panels were brought to the site by truck with a bag of rafter clips. The clips were poked through the metal panels, hook around therafters, and are then secured above the roof with a fastener.

After the metal panels were secured, we installed ridge covers – V-shaped kiln-dried clay pieces to prevent water from falling into the house.

In the end, this family had a new front room and a new roof!

 

Reflection

Another fulfilling adventure full of unique and unforgettable experiences! It never ceases to amaze me the amount of kindness and happiness I see in all the people I help. They live with so much less and barely make ends meet, yet show so much gratitude and sincere joy in life. I don’t know about you, but I think we should start taking lessons from them!

Again, if you have any interest in participating in a Habitat for Humanity Global Village Build and want to learn more, please check out their website. And if I can be of any assistance, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

To read more about another Habitat For Humanity Global Village Trip I participated in, check out my experience in Nepal building bamboo houses…or two of our local projects here.