Joining hands

Tendons, sinews, extensors, pronators, supinators, the fingers, the hand; they produce the ability to grab, pull, push, tear down and build.

One finger can put calories to work, form actual, realized energy from kinetic. Together, however, fingers work as a team. They can focus on a project of ineffable power and scope and enable the project’s completion.

One of these fingers came from the Wood River Valley.

When Alison Nelson was preparing for her November trip to Nepal as a worker on Habitat for Humanity’s Global Village program, her son, Lars, offered a gift to accompany the Wood River Valley resident, mother and worker to the opposite side of the world.

"Take my work gloves, mom," he had said. "Give them to someone who can use them."

Nelson was among a group of 12 Westerners who traveled to Nepal’s Western Terai, a plains area roughly 40 miles north of the India-Nepal border, to help the Tharu tribe build solid homes as part of Habitat’s Global Village program.

The concept behind the program, she explained, is to eliminate poverty-level housing worldwide by showing faith through the action of building houses for others--to construct a many-fingered hand that can enable the unimaginable.

Nelson’s trip actually started in Hailey last April when she enrolled in a College of Southern Idaho woodworking class under the instruction of Wayne Orvik. Skills learned in that class, as well as experience honed by refurbishing her 1910 Hailey home, were the main attributes that helped Nelson procure a spot on the team.

The town of Kargowa, the village where the 12 Habitat volunteers worked, lies on Nepal’s Western Terai beneath a scenic backdrop of the Himalayan foothills. The village’s inhabitants are subsistence rice farmers, who operate their day-to-day lives without power or other Western luxuries. They are of the lowest Nepalese cast, earning about $250 a year, and are heavily discriminated against by members of higher classes.

But the members of the tribe are happy with what they have, Nelson said, and they helped to teach the Western visitors the difference between needs and wants.

"You’re doing so much for these people, but you come back with more than you give," she said, adding that the Tharu were, in general, happier than people in most American neighborhoods.

"Little things were appreciated--everything is appreciated. They were just living (for the sake of living)."

The people were not accustomed to Westerners, Nelson said. Many had never seen a white person before, a far cry from the Nepalese, who live along the trekking routes and have learned to beg for money and material possessions.

The fascinating thing about the glove is that it fits all hands—black, brown, white, red. All have five fingers; all grip, pull and work. And when the glove comes off, the hands can join nondiscriminately, without boundaries, in the celebration of a hard day’s work.

The Tharu were amazed, Nelson said, that people from America were willing to travel the whole way to Nepal to help with a cause like building houses. She explained that, to Tharu children, digging in the earth, thinking about the interminable mine through the planet’s bowels, is believed to result in a tunnel that would emerge in the United States. To the Tharu, America is as far away as China is to young American children.

And help, the foreigners did, working eight- or nine-hour days.

"It was not a vacation," Nelson said; "it was a work trip."

They constructed brick and mortar houses that have cement-shingle roofs. These new, structurally sound homes replaced the thatched huts the Tharu were living in. About every two years, Nelson said, the native-style homes needed to be replaced or repaired following their destruction by the annual monsoons.

When one old man, the recipient of a new home, was asked what the new quarters would offer him, he replied that he would no longer get wet when it rains and wouldn’t have to fight off rats that crawl through his walls.

At one of the home’s completion, Nelson said those who had worked on the house took part in a dedication "drama."

Circled around the front of the house, the masons placed cement in a pile, the work campers added bricks, carpenters put in wood, roofers added shingles, older Tharu tribesmen put in river rocks and the village’s youngest son, Jaget Chaudhary, added sand. The sand from the young man symbolized that every contribution, however large or small, was important to make everyone’s efforts stick together. Without mortar, called mausala, the house could not be; without everyone’s separate efforts as one, it would not been built.

Also, as part of that ceremony, Nelson and the other work campers were given baskets, designed to be carried on the head, as gifts. The Tharu carried everything in these baskets, and the work campers quickly learned that it is an easy and practical way to move things as well. Nelson said that they carried their lunch, vegetables, rice, wood chips for the fire, laundry and sand in the native grass baskets.

In addition at the dedication ceremony, Nelson gave Lars’ working gloves to Suka Ram Chaudhary, a 15-year-old boy and also Jaget’s older brother.

"Those gloves will be used to build 50 more houses," Nelson said.

As Suka Ram Chaudhary sat to rest, he puts the gloves on the ground beside a hole he began to dig a day earlier. He sits and thinks about the interminable mine through the earth, about the Americans at the other end of the tunnel who had helped him, his family and his village build solid roofs over their heads.