Character building
0 Comments | Taranaki Daily News; New Plymouth, New Zealand, Aug 28, 2010
Helen Harvey talks to a woman who wandered so far out of her comfort zone that she wound up in Outer Mongolia.
Tania Beckett Lundy works in an office in New Plymouth. Like a lot of us, her housebuilding/DIY experience is limited to painting the lounge. But at the end of June, she took two weeks off work to build a house.
In Outer Mongolia.
Earlier this year, Miss Beckett Lundy, 42, saw a story in the Taranaki Midweek about a church group going to Samoa with Habitat for Humanity. Intrigued, she googled the organisation to see what it was all about. On the website, there was a list of upcoming builds, including one in Mongolia.
“I thought, That sounds like fun. So I contacted Habitat and it snowballed from there.”
The application form had a series of boxes to tick, starting with qualified builder/engineer, DIY experience . . . right down to the last box, No experience, but willing to learn. Tick.
“That was my one. You had to have the willingness to go for it. If you want to do this, you have to be a team player, be able to work as a team, be able to take direction, and have the willingness to help people.”
On site in Mongolia’s capital of Ulaanbaatar, 160 international volunteers helped build 30 houses in five days. The 10 Kiwis were split into two groups of five. Miss Beckett Lundy’s team spent the first day putting in the insulation. The framework was already up. Working with the Kiwis were Mongolian workers, the family who was going to move into the house and translators. No one in the team spoke Mongolian and none of the locals spoke English.
“But we were constantly laughing because we were all in sign language and trying to learn each other’s words. It was so much fun.”
Polystyrene was put in the ceiling and in the walls. Then, covering the insulation, was a very fine layer of pink batts covered with tin foil, she says. They were up and down scaffolding the whole five days. Once the insulation was in, Miss Beckett Lundy was taught bricklaying.
“The mortar was always mixed up for us in a bath and you mixed three parts sand and one part cement, then put in water. Someone was always passing it to me on my scaffolding,” she says.
She spent hours and hours and hours bricklaying, she says. But it was never boring, because there were so many people around. And someone was always climbing up to talk to her, or to pass her mortar, pass her bricks, pass her food.
“I had my iPod with me, so if a couple of hours were quiet, I had my iPod. But there was always someone there chatting or doing sign language.
“I loved it. I would do it again tomorrow.”
When she arrived in Mongolia, it was 40 degrees. Then it ranged from about 25 to late 30s. In the photos, Miss Beckett Lundy is wearing a hoodie, looking a bit cold.
“Because I was, luckily, on the shady side of the building in the early morning. When I finished that side and went over to the other side of the house, it got way up to the late 30s and my energy levels just plummeted.”
But the hard work was worth it. There was a real sense of achievement when they stood back and saw their little brick house, she says.
The one-bedroom house will be home for a family of four. The family were living in a ger, a tent the size of the average New Zealand living room, with another four people. It’s also sometimes called a yurt.
Afterward, Miss Beckett Lundy and one of her team members spent three days looking around.
One of the translators and his friend took the two Kiwis more than two hours’ drive out of the city. They didn’t have a plan, she says.
“We just went in that direction and saw what happened. That was my favourite time. We got to see the real Mongolia. We got to ride camels and hold an eagle and stayed with a beautiful Mongolian family who instantly welcomed us. I mean, I had read that’s what they are like, really hospitable. They sit you down and feed you.”
The family they met, who their Mongolian friends didn’t know either, invited the four of them into their home.
“When we left they, the lady of the house especially, hung on to us . . . like I was her daughter. She just clung to me.”
The people are so friendly, she says.
“I think it’s being raised in such a small area with a large family. They are just so tolerant and very affectionate. The friends that we made would come and sit here [on the arm of the chair] and you got used to it very quickly. You didn’t cringe, you never took it the wrong way, you never thought, Get out of my space.”
Her new friends would always be leaning on her or putting their arm around her, she says.
Along the way, she found an old Buddhist temple in the mountainside that was incredibly peaceful and visited an orphanage.
The ophanage was in a shanty town, she says, “almost refugee- looking”.
When she saw people living in gers in the city, it was sad, she says
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