A Home with a View

By Gong Sheng

The land around here is barren. For many generations, the Yi people of Butuo County have been working hard to turn this patch of Southern Sichuan into a more beautiful place. The mountains are towering high. For several thousand years, the Yi have been toiling to cultivate this wasteland. However, poverty seems to have spread like an epidemic among Yi families – generation after generation.

Members of an Yi village community in Butuo County help each other build their new homes, which Amity and Habitat for Humanity cofinance.

It was in 2001 that staff from Amity’s integrated development division first came to Butuo. Since then, people from the local Yi minority have developed an idea what social responsibility and care for the underprivileged can mean in practice: people moved from their mud huts, which they shared with their animals, into new homes. A system for clean tap water has been installed so people do not need to fetch water from holes in the cliffs any more. Slippery dirt roads were replaced by plane concrete roads, which makes walking a lot easier. And for the first time in their lives, the villagers have been able to learn some basic mathematics. Now they can check if their eggs they bring to the market are sold at the agreed price.

It seems that the high mountains of Butuo can block peoples’ view but they cannot keep them from realizing their dreams. Edizitu, an Yi man in his early thirties, tries to do just that: owning a little house with windows and a tiled roof. He lives with his family in Liupo, a tiny mountain village in Butuo County. From long hours of work in the fields, he has come to look more like fifty than thirty.

When he was five years old, his father died from a severe disease. His mother could not bear the loss and kept crying all day long. Two years later, she died too. All she left to her son was a primitive hut built in the 1980s of sun-dried mud bricks. From this time on, Edizitu survived only because other people fed him and gave him clothes. With the help of some kindhearted neighbors he managed to complete four years of elementary school. But after this, he did not want to trouble other people anymore, so he quit school and took up farm work instead.

Edizitu, a young father of four children, in front of his house. He firmly believes that life is bound to get better when you work hard. As regards his home, he has proved to be right.

Talking about these miserable past events, Edizitu says that he blames nobody because he firmly believes that problems are always temporary. He thought that, if only he used his two hands and worked hard, things would turn better. Now he has his own family with three lovely girls and a little son who has just started to walk. His oldest daughter is 13 and the youngest not even two. To support his family, Edizitu works in the fields from dawn to dusk. At times, he also helps old widows in the village with their own farm and house work. The family raises four pigs and three chickens, which they sell in the county seat market. This is the annual income of the family.

Edizitu had always had a dream, he told us. For a long time he wanted to have one of these beautiful tiled-roof houses. Over the years, the house which his parents had left to him had become wretched. Layer after layer of the sun-dried bricks were coming down and people would see ever more clearly the family’s misfortune.

Then, in 2007, Amity and Habitat for Humanity started the house-building project in Liupo. When people from Amity’s local office came to the village with the good news, Edizitu was brimming with enthusiasm for this project: “I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep for several days,” he remembers, “I had always thought a new house would remain just a dream.”

Edizitu in front of his new house

One worry remained, though – he had to raise RMB 5000 by himself. In addition to his own savings of RMB 2000, he had to borrow RMB 3000 from several other people before he was able to take part in Amity’s project.

Edizitu will move into his spacious new home after some final construction work is done, he told us. Unlike his old hut, the new house has windows so fresh air can circulate easily. Also, he is not afraid anymore that the walls might collapse. His children are all excited to move in, too. Every day they run down the hill to look at their new home.

What is even better, the project has changed the villagers’ outlook. They are now much more willing to work together and help those families who do not have enough people to build a house on their own. Now, an atmosphere of helpfulness and cooperation can be felt everywhere. When we arrived at the construction site, Edizitu himself was working on a neighbor’s rooftop. “Amity has done good for the village and its people,” he says.