It’s Sunday noon, after the fourth day of communal building, and finally, after quite some time, I feel the urge to write a post. I have to warn you though, that in this instance, words fail. Photos fail. Phone conversations fail. Fail to convey. The. Utter. Wonder. That takes hold of us sometimes while working with this community.
We’ve been working every Sunday for a month, and I would’ve thought that by now we’d be working with two or three locals at the most. Wrong! Try twenty or thirty. Most of them secondary school students, but some adults. Some of them even people that have never come to build before. Even now, one month into the hard construction work, new people are still joining us. The community’s commitment to this project does not wane.

And still I cannot find the words to describe….

OK, here’s what I think: I think we are a vessel. Only a tool to help the people here realize (both literally and figuratively) their full potential. And maybe that is the great thing that I feel on this day. When we work with them, we don’t actually work, you see. Even if we want to, I don’t think we actually can. Do we know how to build a palm-leaf roof? No. Do we know how to remove concrete residue from metal? No. Do we know how to improvise sand paper from coconut skins or twigs? We couldn’t even think it up. All we can do is maybe paint some walls, or clean up the debris, or hand out water. But all the building, the actual building, that’s all them. This truly is the community coming together to do something for themselves. And this is our greatest achievement, but we never actually did anything at all.