| New Classrooms in Nepal | ||||||||||||
| By Weng Shi Ying Translated by Tang Yau-yang | ||||||||||||
Malaysian Tzu Chi volunteers have helped complete more than a hundred prefabricated classrooms in the aftermath of the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. More are under construction.
In the aftermath of the severe earthquake that devastated Nepal in April 2015, the Tzu Chi Foundation set out to build 158 prefabricated classrooms. The first 97 classrooms were built in the nation’s capital, Kathmandu, and its suburbs. They were built mostly during the rainy season, from June to September. The construction of the remaining 61 classrooms, located in remote villages, was started in October 2015 and is scheduled to be completed in March 2016. The rain made it necessary to put off the construction in remote areas. “We first worked in schools that were no more than 90 minutes away by car from the capital,” said Li Ji Lang (李濟瑯). “We started building after the rainy season at schools in remote areas, because roads in the mountains become dangerously slippery in the rain, making driving treacherous.” Li is a Tzu Chi volunteer from Penang, Malaysia. He and Zhang Ji Xuan (張濟玄), also from Penang, are responsible for planning and administering Tzu Chi’s post-quake prefab classroom project in Nepal. These classrooms are in high demand. Volunteers received requests for them from many school principals, but the disaster zone was too vast for the volunteers to cover. They surveyed and assessed schools primarily from a list that education authorities provided. Many requests, therefore, could not be honored. “There are many community schools operated by private citizens in Nepal, in addition to the government-sponsored public schools and privately funded schools,” Li observed. “The earthquake damaged a large number of them. There are simply too many for us to help every one of them rebuild. It’s very frustrating.” He added that this was his biggest regret.
Nothing easy about the prefabs The quake struck on April 25, 2015, and destroyed or damaged over 30,000 classrooms. As a result, classes were either relocated to other locations, or conducted in hallways or makeshift facilities, such as tents or shelters of bamboo and tarpaulins. Nearly all of these are poor substitutes for the real thing, and consequently learning has suffered. Since education cannot be delayed, building prefab classrooms became one of the priorities in Tzu Chi’s medium-term aid effort. Li and Zhang arrived in Nepal in mid-May 2015, about three weeks after the disaster, when the nation was still up to its ears in emergency response activities. “Even though the country was still in the heat of emergency response, we began looking ahead to medium-term aid projects,” they said. “We wanted to rush so we could complete as many prefab classrooms as we could before the rainy season set in.” The volunteers from Malaysia had experience in constructing prefab buildings in their home country. After Malaysia was hit by severe flooding in 2014, Tzu Chi built 200 prefab houses for victims in the state of Kelantan. At the time, volunteers had to go through five rounds of modifications to make the buildings just right. They gained valuable experience in the process, which they could now apply to the building project in Nepal.
Even so, when the volunteers tried to apply their Kelantan experience, they quickly discovered that local factors got in the way. They had to make adjustments. One challenge was to obtain building materials for the classrooms. “We considered sourcing them from Taiwan [where Tzu Chi is based], but we couldn’t make the shipping dates that we needed,” Li observed. Therefore, they could not adopt the Taiwanese designs. In the interest of time and cost, volunteers decided to procure the materials locally and to base their design on what they knew firsthand: the Kelantan model. They started shopping around for materials. Large businesses tended to ask for very high prices, so they tried smaller ones, which offered a better value. Securing the materials they wanted turned out to be quite a challenge. In Malaysia, they had used polypropylene boards for roofing, but those were hard to come by in Nepal. Galvanized metal sheets were readily available, but they would be unbearably noisy when it rained. In the midst of these challenges, Basant Chaudhary, a local entrepreneur, connected the volunteers with reliable suppliers with whom they finalized the materials for the classrooms. They decided to use metal posts for the frames, cement boards for the walls, and galvanized sheets with polyurethane foam insulation for the roofs. With materials such as these, they could build classrooms in Nepal that would be as good as what they had built in Malaysia. Some materials that they needed had to be imported from India. That meant high prices. For a while, a shortage in construction workers drove up their wages. These circumstances pushed up the cost of building the classrooms. Try as they might to negotiate better deals, the volunteers could not do any better. They just had to pay those necessary bills. “I negotiated and talked so much every day that my voice became hoarse,” said Li. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tired. But time was ticking away. Every time I saw children attending lessons in the hallways, I felt for them. I knew that we had to pick up our pace so that the classrooms could be completed as soon as possible.”
More challenges Once the materials had been decided upon, work began in earnest. A group of Malaysian Tzu Chi volunteers arrived in Nepal with all the tools they would need to work on the project. “The first task assigned to us was to put up a demonstration classroom,” Zhang stated. “Then we recruited quake victims to work for cash to help erect the rest of the classrooms.” This way of encouraging personal participation put money in the pockets of local people while taking their minds off what they had lost to the quake, if only temporarily. Walls for the prefab classrooms were to be made of cement boards fastened to metal posts using steel joiner plates. The joiner plates were a key component in the assembly of the prefab classrooms. Volunteers could not find a local company to make them, so they brought them in from Malaysia. One shipment of one and a half tons of joiner plates got stuck in customs. Local volunteers worked with customs and the ministries of education and finance to clear the goods. They finally succeeded, but two weeks were lost in the process, and the work schedule was irreversibly disrupted. The Malaysian volunteers put their heads together to find a way to avoid relying on joiner plates from Malaysia. They eventually worked out a way in which two cement boards could be overlapped so that simple screws could fix both to a metal post. This eliminated the need for joiner plates altogether. Another challenge was frequent power outages. Volunteers and local workers had to stop their work whenever an outage occurred because power tools like electric drills were useless without electricity. Power outages were a serious issue; the electricity went out just about every day. Unlike the joiner plate problem, no amount of human ingenuity could get around the blackouts. Yet another thorny problem the construction crew had to contend with was the rain. It slowed things down. They had to pick up their pace whenever the rain stopped to make up for the lost time. Zhang was most grateful to the contractors for their willingness to work on a schedule dictated by the rain. A final issue that troubled the volunteers was the quality of work, which was spotty at first. Fortunately after the project team worked on the issue, the situation improved and the quality of construction was brought up to snuff.
What’s in it for Tzu Chi? Bagiswori College was one of the schools for which Tzu Chi built prefab classrooms. Principal Dhan Kumar Shrestha pointed out that many aid organizations had donated money or goods to his school, but none of them had donated any manpower. He remarked that Tzu Chi volunteers worked alongside local workers to assemble classrooms. They worked in the hot sun with them and would not even rest after sundown. Later, when he learned that these volunteers had come at their own expense from Malaysia and Taiwan, he was even more surprised. The faculty of the school was well aware of the quality of the classrooms, and they knew that a lot of expense was involved. As a result, they kept asking the volunteers if Tzu Chi wanted anything in return. Li repeatedly assured them that there were no strings attached to the gift. When the faculty asked what they could do to help, Li said that if they wanted they could visit the people in the surrounding area forced to live in tents after the earthquake. He suggested that they could care for those people, talk to them, and find out what they needed. “You may not be able to help them, but you can tell us about their situation. Based on the information that you provide us, we can extend care to them. In this way, you will be our volunteers, too,” said Li. Volunteers gave Principal Dhan Kumar Shrestha a copy of Jing Si Aphorisms by Master Cheng Yen, which he has kept in his pocket ever since. He takes it out in his classes and reads a few verses to his students. He also likes to share the aphorisms with his family and tell them about the foundation. His favorite aphorism is: “Talk does not bring about social changes. Action does.”
Tzu Chi volunteers Li Ji Lang and Zhang Ji Xuan have been instrumental in the implementation of the prefab classroom project. Li first participated in Tzu Chi’s international relief work after anti-Chinese riots erupted in Indonesia in 1998. He helped in large-scale aid distributions that the foundation held in the aftermath of the riots. He volunteered in Iran after an earthquake hit the nation in 2003. After the horrendous 2004 South Asian tsunami, he helped out in Sri Lanka. Then four years later, when Cyclone Nagis devastated Burma (Myanmar), he took part in Tzu Chi’s emergency aid work there. Li said that his participation in these international relief efforts was invaluable to him. What he saw in these disaster zones helped him understand with more clarity that life, fraught with changes, is impermanent and that death can strike at the drop of a hat. As a result, he often reminds himself to let go of attachments, such as to material wealth, and to accept that interpersonal relationships do not last forever. This helps him cherish his relationships with everyone. As for Zhang Ji Xuan, Nepal is the third foreign country in which he has volunteered, after Sri Lanka and Burma. Regardless of where he serves, he does Tzu Chi work with the same mindset: “When I go to a new place to volunteer, I don’t just get involved with material aid. Tzu Chi’s ultimate goal is to help people purify and transform their hearts, so I talk to people about these ideals every chance I get.” This trip to Nepal was largely a race against the clock and the rain. Zhang and everyone else involved in classroom construction had to rush to build. He was often busy from morning till night and inevitably felt physically tired. Yet, despite his fatigue, he talked to teachers and students about the foundation. He and other Tzu Chi volunteers also tried to get teachers and students involved in the project. For example, they asked them to lay the foundation with concrete and bricks before they started erecting the building. Zhang emphasized that these arrangements were not meant to save money, but to give the teachers and students a sense of participation. He remarked that the participation of the teachers and students at Bagiswori Higher Secondary School and College was the most touching. “Before construction got underway, we held an information session at the school to help the students and teachers understand the entire process,” Zhang said. “The engineering students worked with us on the construction, and they were active from the start. They apparently felt the urgency of the prefab classrooms the same way we did.” The faculty and students built a boundary around the construction site and poured concrete for the foundation. They wanted to keep everything in good shape, so when it rained, they covered the cement boards and other supplies with plastic sheets to protect them. Even though volunteers brought their own meals to the work site, teachers still prepared drinks and snacks for them. Their thoughtfulness warmed Zhang’s heart. Zhang stayed in Nepal for a total of two months, during which time he traveled back and forth three times. For him, the Nepalese were friendly and open-minded, giving the volunteers more latitude to do things for them. International aid projects have enriched Zhang. “People often view disaster victims from their own vantage points, so they feel sorry for their suffering,” he said. “But perhaps the victims themselves don’t feel as distressed as we think, because they have fewer desires. The reason we feel that they are in need is because we have many more desires than they do. We should learn not to think too much of material possessions. Being rich at heart is the most important thing of all.”
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