Real Time: Qionglai & Mayan Village

After 30+ hours of traveling, I arrived safely in Chengdu on Saturday. If you haven’t stayed awake for 48 hours before, it’s quite an experience. Somehow, though, I made it to a reasonable sleeping hour – and slept like a rock.

I met the other Global Village team members the next morning. After a quick breakfast, we loaded a minibus and headed to the Wolong Panda Research Center, where we spent the morning up close and personal with pandas - of both the black & white and red variety. The afternoon was spent traveling to Qionglai, our home base for the week.

Yesterday, we were up bright and early for the drive to Mayan, the village where we are building. After a white-knuckled 40-minutes of watching our driver weave in and out of lanes and narrowly passing trucks, scooters, and pedestrians, we were dropped off at the entrance to the village – an old concrete bridge spanning a beautiful stretch of river. We had definitely left the city for the countryside. No high-rise buildings, no traffic to speak of, no car horns. Just humble mud-brick homes nestled amid rows of corn and rice.

The build site was on the other side of the village. I was stunned at the sheer size of it – the brick skeletons of at least two-dozen houses dotted the valley floor. I later learned that over 200 people would be living in them once they were completed. Workers were busy mixing mortar, laying brick, and pouring concrete foundations. Our crew leaders directed us up a small hill at the back of the project site. The team split into several groups; I joined the bricklaying team and set to work on building a water tank.

Despite our best efforts, our section of the tank was rather unimpressive – quite crooked, in fact. The shifu – the boss – didn’t seem to mind; he went ahead and finished it later that afternoon.

Our lunch break was the highlight of the day. Not only because of the chance to rest and refuel, but to have a walk around the village and get a glimpse of the daily lives of the people who live here. Our first stop was a mahjong parlor, then Scotty, one of our Habitat China coordinator, took us across the courtyard to where they were making cooking oil. The place smelled like burnt popcorn. They were using rapeseed – slightly bigger than poppy seeds – to make the oil The rapeseed was heated in a furnace, then funneled into a press, out of which came a yellow, creamy liquid. This would later be filtered to produce the final product.

Our final stop in the village was the home of one of the homeowners. The woman on the left in the last photo is 85, if you can believe it. The other woman is her daughter. They were kind enough to invite us all in – and kept wanting to feed us. We politely said that we had already eaten. They used to live up on the mountain, until a landslide and destroyed their home. They now live in a small house in the village, waiting until their new home is finished. The landslide destroyed many homes – and is what prompted Habitat to work with the government to build safer homes in the valley.

After lunch it, we formed a line and started passing bricks from a never-ending pile (thanks to frequent deliveries by a huge front-loader) to be stacked around the foundation. The sun decided to finally show its face, making us drip with sweat as we passed and stacked 15 lb. bricks. After a couple of hours of doing that, it was time to leave and go back to Qionglai for dinner and a cold shower.