Housing and Habitat is an innately active, physical service. Our service is very hands-on and allows us to help people directly with whatever project we work on. As a result, continuing the service during DLP was one of the most challenging things we had to overcome. Our first few lessons were spent trying to come up with ways to spend time productively, evaluating and reorganizing our projects and goals, and deciding what we would do next. We agreed fairly quickly that our previous project, Uplift, would have been difficult to continue with each of us separated and on different schedules. Eventually, we narrowed our goals down to trying to establish a legacy of some sort and preparing for our leaders and DP2s to leave. We began reaching out to old contacts such as Mr Gamage from the Janoda foundation, where we helped fix the fence at the orphanage on our 2019 WWW trip. This was to see if there were any other projects we could help with, especially something we could do remotely, however we received no response. While doing this we also started setting up social media accounts, the links to which you can find at the bottom of this post, to help introduce our service to the next group of students coming in. Around the third session we found an organization with a similar goal and message to ours, and Mr Lockwood helped us get in contact.
We set up a zoom meeting with someone the old group, Habitat for Humanity, had worked with and were able to discuss some ways we might be able to participate in one of their latest projects. The project, Brick by Brick, entailed funding and constructing homes for families with low income in less developed areas in Sri Lanka. This new project felt fairly in line with our goals so we agreed to help. We wanted to start simply by either raising enough money to construct a small home or to make a series of small donations over time. Considering the dangers of holding a large-scale fundraiser of any kind, as well as the limited time and resources, we decided to instead pursue another idea. We have yet to establish another meeting with the group, however, we are getting back on track to helping people and believe that we will be able to meet in person soon. Our long term goals are still being decided and we are in the process of preparing the service for the departure of our DP2s, but altogether, I am confident in the ability of the people we leave the service to, and I trust that they will continue to pursue whatever goals they decide on.
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