Local pair plan ultimate 'working vacation'

Duo joins Habitat Intl. team to build homes in Mozambique

SANDPOINT - The sales pitch would make for an interesting vacation brochure: Come spend two weeks in a tiny Mozambique village with tight sleeping accommodations that may require bedding down on the floor. Facilities are minimal; showers are cold. Meals will include unfamiliar and, at least for Westerners, highly unusual ingredients. A minimum of eight full days of hard labor guaranteed at no additional cost to the traveler.

Welcome to the world of “voluntourism,” where visiting a foreign country means throwing your back into real work in order to make a real difference.

In June, local resident Judy Bell and friend, Barbara Pressler, will fly to Mozambique on their own dime and then leave another $2,000 or so behind for the privilege of joining a Global Village project as part of Habitat for Humanity International's efforts around the world. They will on an eight-member team that will help build homes in the community of Massaca.

“One of my primary reasons for going is because I don't like to donate to funds - I never really know where my money is going,” Pressler said. “The two draws for me were taking a trip to Africa and having a chance to help people out, first-hand.

“I love going to Third World countries and relating to the children,” added Pressler, whose international travels have carried her to places like India, Nepal and Papau, New Guinea. “The kids in the villages are so much fun.”

The home-building project will involve building simple homes - it costs about $1,000 for Habitat to build a house in Mozambique - that will be used by families caring for orphans and vulnerable children (OVC).

The housing projects are designed to complement emergency programs for children whose parents have died from HIV/AIDS. In Mozambique alone, more than 500,000 children have been orphaned by the AIDS epidemic, according to Habitat for Humanity International. By last year, about 600 of them had been sheltered in homes constructed with the help of Habitat team members. Hundreds more are on the way.

Along with housing, the program provides latrines, mosquito nets, water treatment kits, instruction in housing maintenance and the legal documents necessary for an inheritance plan to the families who receive new homes, ensuring that the orphaned children will, once they're older, become the owners. In the interim, the homes are used by relatives, friends or neighbors who agree to care for and raise the orphaned children under that roof.

Although the Global Village projects touch almost every country, Habitat for Humanity International has focused on the OVC program in this African nation.

“It was a priority established by Mozambique, because they're overwhelmed by children who are not part of families,” Bell said. “The girls are vulnerable to prostitution; the boys are vulnerable to the military. They end up doing anything they can to survive.”

Each team member pays a fee to take part in the building project and the money goes into a fund to buy building materials for the next round of homes. For Bell and Pressler, the trip is the most effective way they can imagine to offset the global image of the “Ugly American” as someone who is loud, overfed and either ignorant or unconcerned about what goes on in the rest of the world.

“People are flabbergasted when they learn that there are Americans who are willing to go someplace and help build a house for someone they've never met,” Bell said. “It's so different from the impression they have of us.”

For these two women, changing that impression in a lasting way means doing so in person by getting down to work, rather than engaging in painless philanthropy by slipping a few bucks into a mission envelope a couple of times a year.

“I think everyone should have a chance to travel to a Third World country - if even for a couple of days - to witness the kind of poverty that exists and see how it affects children,” Pressler said. “It seems like our culture is becoming even more based on the value of things and what we have. The awareness of what really matters starts at home, with what we're teaching our own children.”

“And it's a lot more than just saying, ‘Clean up your plate - children are starving in India,'” Bell added.

Team members are encouraged to bring along family photos to share with new friends, but avoid pictures that might be seen as flaunting their wealth or extravagant lifestyle to an impoverished nation.

“In other words, you don't want to bring a picture of yourself posing in front of your Mercedes,” Bell said.

Gifts, too, should be simple in nature - pencils for the village school or basic supplies for the medical clinic. The greatest gift these working visitors can bestow, according to Habitat, is the same “sweat equity” that each family will invest as their new homes are constructed.

Pressler learned about the opportunity to travel to Mozambique when her friend's brother and sister-in-law, Bob and Leslie Bell, visited Sandpoint and presented a slide show on their own, long-time involvement with Habitat for Humanity International projects around the world. Hearing that the couple would act as trip leaders in June and learning that Judy planned to join them as one of the workers, Pressler added her name to the list of people heading for Africa.

While they are in Mozambique, the women may be in close proximity to other tourists who are in the midst of a very different vacation experience, one that is completely protected from the reality that exists just outside the gated walls of their resort compound, just out of sight of those lounging poolside.

“The thing is, it's getting easier and easier to be whisked off to these countries and never see the poverty,” Bell said. “You can surround yourself with incredible luxury, go to the private beaches, eat well, drink well and be waited on the whole time you're there.”

“Not me,” said Pressler. “I want to be challenged. Give me the snakes, the bugs and the butterflies. I want the adventure.”

“I don't really know exactly what this is going to be like,” Bell admitted. “I'm a total newbie to all of this.”

Pressler, on the other hand, has an idea of what to expect when she arrives based on her other journeys abroad.

“I think it depends on how much you've traveled to countries like that,” she said. “You know you're going to see some sad things, but after a while, nothing is alarming any more. It's just the real world that you're seeing.

“And the real world is a wake-up call.”

For information about the Mozambique housing project visit: www.habitat.org/gv and click on Mozambique under the “Featured Global Village Trips” subheading. Information about making donations to this particular project, using the event code GV8125, can be found on this same site.