Just outside the small town of Lonavala, India, 2500 volunteers of the Jimmy Carter Work Project built 100 houses in five days. The dates were October 30 through November 3.  We were thrilled to be among the group of 200 North Americans chosen to participate.  One thousand volunteers came from India.  The rest came from 32 other nations.

The JCWP was actually a kick off event for India Builds, an India HFH event in which housing for 250,000 people will be constructed by the year 2010. The cement block homes with tile roofs that we built are only 348 square ft. in size. Still they are a vast improvement for families who have been living under worn tarps or under metal sheets on dirt floors.We can only imagine what their living conditions were like during the recent monsoon when 25 feet of rain came down!

The new home owners belong to a women's coop of farmers. They will occupy the new homes along with their husbands and children. Our homeowner, Muktabai Gund, was abandoned by her husband. She presently lives with her brother and is employed as a daily wage worker in the fields. She has been a coop member for five years.  Each house costs around $2800 in US dollars. The homeowners pay $920, $60 as a downpayment and then $15 a month for five years. Habitat for Humanity picks up a third of the tab and the balance is paid by private companies. Each house has a sponsoring organization. Sadly, millions of people in India can never afford even such a small payment so can never qualify for Habitat homes.

Our days started early in Lonavala. We got up at 5 am every day to take the half hour bus ride to the work site. After breakfast, we started work at 7:30 am. We had all our meals at the work site and were entertained during morning break and in the evening by dancers from every state in India dressed in colorful attire. We even had afternoon tea served to us by handsome young Indian men in formal dress. Nevertheless the work was hard and the temperatures were in the mid nineties. By the time we got back to the hotel at 7:30p.m. we were too tired for sightseeing.

All of the houses were duplexes so we had two work teams working as one unit. There were twenty people on our team, three from Ireland, one from Canada, several Indians including the homeowners and interpreters and the rest of us were from the US. As usual, the closing ceremony was very moving and we all shed a few tears. After a week of working together, we had all become attached to our two lovely homeowner ladies.

What fun it was to meet people from so many countries. We shared our hotel with twenty Australians who immediately included us into their group.

Traditionally at the end of the week at the closing ceremony, a hammer is passed to someone from the the next JCWP location, in this case, Los Angeles. Since we did not use hammers on these houses, the oversized hoe that we used for mixing cement was passed to the LA delegation.

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