Markham College: Building Houses and Repairing Communities 

Students and teachers of Markham College in Peru outline the key elements of their ten-year house building service programme, which has provided staff and students with vital skills to support community redevelopment and come to the aid of those same communities in times of crisis.

Author and position: Harry Hildebrand (Deputy Head HELIX), John Vincent (Head of Outdoor Education) and students, Nicolas Vargas and Fatima Castellanos 

School: Markham College is co-educational Day school serving 2100 students. The campus is situated in the capital city, Lima. 

Introduction 

In 2007, the coast of Peru was hit by a powerful earthquake which devastated vast regions of the country and sadly led to the loss of hundreds of lives. The severity was such that tremors were felt throughout the nation, including the capital of Lima (where Markham College is based) some 100 miles away from the epicentre. 

The response from Markham’s school leadership team, led by the Headmaster Trevor McKinlay, was both passionate and practical. With homes, hospitals, schools and community centres levelled to the ground, they devised a school response that involved: 

• Collection and donations of food and clothing ‘survival packs’. 
• Fundraising (including support of many Round Square schools) followed by reconstruction of a local school. 
• Construction of temporary classrooms to help get children back to school. 
• Construction of community centres so that communities could receive food donations and store them and support each other. 
• Construction of houses for families who three years after the earthquake, were still living in small shelters made from woven straw. 

Harry Hildebrand and the then Head of Design and Technology, David Newsham, designed the original community centres based on a module 8 foot x 8 foot.  The original community centres were made up of 16 of these modules.  The design evolved over the years with many modifications implemented by students involved in the project.  

Thirty two community centres were built between August 2007 and December 2009.  Since then the project has been focused more on homes and 265 houses have been built since 2010. 

But rather than ‘down tools’ when the worst was over, the school pledged to continue its work, seeking opportunities to repair and modernise community spaces and homes in other rural villages where the need arose.  

The project has become almost completely student-led with four projects taking place each year. A typical project involves almost 200 volunteers building 13 houses in a weekend.  Each house is built by a team of 15-16 volunteers led by 2-3 student leaders and supervised by one staff member.  To be selected as a leader, students need to have built at least 3 houses as a volunteer. 

Having retained this expertise, the school was ready to respond again ten years later when torrential rains, caused by the climatic movement known as El Nino, led to severe floods destroying thousands of buildings and leaving many of those standing engorged in mud and waste. 

Planning: The long-term programme 

Students gain their first experience of a service project as part of a wider school initiative, for example, on an Outdoor Education school trip where they might also take part in rock climbing, trekking, camping and other adventurous pursuits. Putting service work alongside this activity helps frame the activity in a positive and inspiring light and sends the message that helping others can be as richly rewarding and enjoyable as these other endeavours. 

A lot of consideration is also put into organising volunteer groups. As much as possible, students are grouped with their friends. This helps create an emotional buffer, easing the students into the different tasks and environment with the support of their personal network. Sharing this type of work with friends also creates special memories for the students, increasing the likelihood that the experience will be a positive one. 

Starting students on their service learning journey young allows the school to develop their expertise in line with their capabilities. In the early years, students begin by building a single room, such as a classroom. Then, they progress to more complicated structures, such as a library, before advancing to creating entire buildings. 

Activity

Response to the 2017 floods 

The catastrophic floods of 2017 devastated Peru and many other countries on the Western coast of South America. The government ordered for all schools to close temporarily (mud slides had affected the water supply) but the Markham College community continued to collaborate over email to discuss ways that they could support the recovery efforts. 

The school’s first response was to announce a drive for donations to create survival packs of food and water, which were collected at school, packaged and then donated to an organisation called OLI. 

Staff and students continued to follow news reports and learned how communities remained in peril even when the floods had receded. Thousands of buildings (homes, schools, hospitals) remained unusable, filled floor to ceiling with mud and detritus.  

Staff liaised over social media to co-ordinate an aid response and helped clear mud from some of the affected areas. They became aware of the crisis situation in Barba Blanca, a village in the mountains, where a catastrophic mudslide had in the words of a New York Times reporter “erased Barba Blanca from the map”. With the road to the village demolished, the Markham staff volunteers, led by John Vincent, had to trek up the mountain carrying all their tools then began hours of work to clear mud from the village buildings. 

Harry Hildebrand and John Vincent were keen to apply the school’s expertise to support the re-building of homes and community facilities. They visited Huachipa in the outskirts of Lima, an area also badly damaged by the mudslides (huaicos), and devised a plan with the Mayor to re-build homes for those worst affected. 

With the school still closed, early efforts focused on a small group of volunteers – 20 students and a handful of teachers. 

Although the students were already skilled in building houses, as many had been involved in the school’s ongoing community development and service programme, the scale of the crisis meant that they had to work faster than ever before building, in some cases, four houses in a single day. The days were long, with volunteers leaving school early and returning late at night. 

The Easter break followed the school’s temporary shutdown which meant that it was some weeks later before the school community came together in person to look at what more could be done. 

They discovered that the progress of mud removal back up in Barba Blanca had been depressingly slow. The support agencies had dissipated and Barba Blanca seemed to have been forgotten. It became obvious that this village should be the focus of the Service Project during the Outdoor Education trip for the 12-year-old students, which happens each year in the same valley. The combined student and staff volunteer force began clearing the village school, and their involvement put the spotlight on Barba Blanca again and energised the authorities to reignite their recovery efforts. The students raised money to fund additional building materials and tools, which they achieved through corporate sponsorships, charity sales and raffles and Markham’s connections with the Round Square community. 

Challenges 

Individuals and community representatives may not always accept help readily. This was certainly the case when we appeared in Barba Blanca with our students offering to help clear mud from the houses. A number of organisations were against it – some thought it was too dangerous for the children as it was muddy (we didn’t, we had done our own risk assessment) and tried to dissuade us from going in to help. In that moment, our teacher, John Vincent, turned round to the children for a classic ‘just in time’ teaching moment. He told them that sometimes you can’t take “no” for an answer and marched straight into the village school. As the children followed, one student proudly piped up with “Don’t worry Mayor, we’re going to clear mud out of this school”. They began working and didn’t stop for the next 3.5 hours. 

There are many times when it is important to exercise sensitivity. There are many deserving families in need of help and we cannot help them all. The students learn to be patient, kind but also clear when people approach them imploring them for help. Saying “no” to someone in need is extremely hard but students understand that they have to prioritise where they offer their support and learn how to sensitively communicate this to others. 

It is perhaps inevitable that motivating students to clear mud is much harder than getting them to build houses! The results can take longer to achieve and the tasks are less varied. There are also some students that dislike getting muddy. To overcome this, one of our teachers (John) marched straight through the mud to his waist to show that you may as well accept you will get muddy! Leaders were also attuned to flagging enthusiasm and thought about ways that they could recover team motivation, for example, through job or location rotations. 

Impact 

Being able to put a roof over the head of families who would otherwise be homeless is a gift of joy that our students and staff never forget. In building the houses, they have often found themselves working side-by-side with the family in need as well as other members of the community. It feels very personal when they gather together at the end to celebrate the house being finished and see the tears of joy on the faces of those who will live there. Students also gain an insight into another way of life that they may not normally be exposed to – they see how people live, interact, what they eat, the clothes they wear – the stark realities of life in economically disadvantaged areas. This teaches them to be more thankful for their fortunes and more compassionate towards others. Even the drudgery of mud clearance teachers the students a valuable lesson in humility and the importance of perseverance. 

Being part of a continuous project is very empowering for our students. They can see how their skills can be applied to help communities develop. They are reminded that you don’t have to wait for a disaster to help out but should a disaster occur, they are armed with practical skills which they can use to make a big impact.  

A sustained project also yields benefits in student volunteer recruitment. Students’ positive experiences inspire others to get on board. Whilst at the start of our aid efforts we had just 30 volunteers sign up for each project, we now have over 200.  

The students’ efforts have also encouraged other authorities to take more action. Pictures of young children, shovel in hand and knee-deep in mud has shown what can be achieved! 

Beyond the immense satisfaction that comes from a project of this nature, students also gain in many other ways. They learn how to work together as a team and see the results they can achieve as part of their collective efforts. Students are given key responsibilities for some aspects of the building work providing a sense of responsibility for their own work area, and confidence in their ability to work and make decisions independently. 

As their experience grows, they learn how to become effective leaders; they understand their own leadership style and gain confidence in managing students just a few years younger than themselves. Some even take a step further in their role as leadership co-ordinators, overseeing multiple leaders and projects. 

As with many building projects, there are often things can go wrong, whether that’s materials not arriving or the challenge of creating a flat foundation on a mountainous terrain, but the students quickly become confident in solving problems as they arise, and learn how to collaborate with others to reach these solutions. 

The future 

We plan to continue incorporating hands on service in the Outdoor Education programme to allow all students in the school to have a ‘taster’ of Service Learning to encourage them to get involved in situations that arise later and to encourage them to develop their own projects. 

On the horizon, the Regional Round Square Conference will involve participation for all delegates in a building project similar to the one we carried out in response to the mudslides. 

We will continue our house-huilding project and as we have done so far this year, help other schools to develop their own projects using the designs we have developed. 

Advice

• There were three key elements to both the Barba Blanca and Huachipa projects- getting a team to go and help, getting transport, and finding somewhere where we could be effective using hand tools.  
• There were lots of people saying they were motivated to help, but few of those people were actually willing to get muddy, dirty, sweaty and tired. My advice would be to think broadly about all the ways people could help – are there clean jobs people can be involved in? Can someone be handed the responsibility of logistics? Can a student team be in charge of fundraising? As a school we know that there is more value and education in getting our students (and staff) actually doing something tangible, rather than just donating money. 
• We were lucky with transport as one of the bus companies we used were sympathetic to our motivation, and didn’t worry about us making their buses extremely dirty! I made sure each trip would be self-funded, so volunteers paid their share of the total bus cost, plus some extra to allow me to buy tools for the work. 
• Finding somewhere appropriate for us to work was the biggest challenge – we needed a place worth salvaging, where a machine couldn’t access and do the work in a fraction of the time- so hand power was the only option, and somewhere that it was realistic we could clear it in the time we had. Contacting organisations already embedded in the community is a good strategy, be it a school (even if the school isn’t affected, they could find out if there are families which are affected), a religious group, an NGO, sports club or other community hub. I walked around Huachipa trying to find somewhere suitable for us to work meaningfully, and I was lucky to find somewhere solvable. 
• Look for ways to involve the students in all aspects of the project you develop.  I am currently in the process of planning for house-building projects in August, September and October.  Each project has 200 volunteers and the leaders of each project are currently organising the groups on a google doc and negotiating between themselves to fairly divide the student volunteers whose ages range from 9-18 years of age.  Closer to the date, the student leaders will select their recipient families and organise their work plan, materials required and tool boxes.  Then when the project date arrives they will perform miracles with two days of hard work and leadership. 
• As was the case after the 2017 mudslides, children, especially those who have tuned into the media and have been impacted by the disaster, are desperate to ‘do something’.   Parents (and schools) tend to be quite protective of students as a general rule and do not consider the normal process of assessing risks of an activity when students want to get involved.  The answer is usually a simple no!   
• Safe activities such as organising collections of food and clothing are an excellent way to respond initially.  However, if students have had experienced a variety of different service projects and are given the opportunity to be part of a school response to a disaster like this, then they are able to propose excellent ideas and contribute a great deal towards the action plan.  That was the case with the house building project we carried out in Huachipa. 
• To implement a programme in a school (no disaster needed) there needs to be at least equal importance given to both the ‘need’ and the educational process.  Just raising money to help a cause will always lack educational outcomes (even though much can be done with awareness campaigns etc.).  Just doing a project that is educational (and often ‘hands on’) for the students but does not really address a genuine need is also often unsatisfactory.  If a need can be identified, funds (or materials) raised AND opportunities exist for the use of those funds (or materials) by the students to carry out the project AND the recipients can be part of the process – then you are on to something!