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Southern exposure – building in Brazil

Southern exposure – building in Brazil

In this piece adapted from Cambridge University Engineering Society’s Cambridge Engineer magazine, Department of Engineering alumnus Jonny Waller (MEng) writes about his experiences over the course of a summer in Brazil working with the EcoHouse Society.

We saw how important it is to listen to the needs of the people you are working with rather than telling them what their problems are and how to solve them.

Jonny Waller

This summer I travelled to Brazil as part of a team of five with EcoHouse. The main focus points of the trip were conducting research that will guide the work of the society next year and working to improve the process used to create a low-cost emergency shelter for poor families in Brazil’s slums, which are known as favelas.

The trip represents a small piece of an ongoing relationship between the EcoHouse Society and a large nongovernmental organisation (NGO) called TECHO (TETO in Brazil). Since 2011, EcoHouse has been sending teams of students to Brazil and Ecuador to work with TECHO. TECHO’s work is focused on community development, which can be achieved through many possible projects. TECHO works very hard to strengthen communities in order to help them to solve their own problems.

Often the communities where TETO in Brazil works contain families that are made very vulnerable by their housing. In 2012, when TETO surveyed 2,177 families interested in having a TETO house, the organisation found 14% of houses regularly had sewage enter the house when it rains – 25% answered “rains inside” when asked whether the roof leaks. These shocking statistics provide a strong motivation for working on housing.

Getting to work

We began our placement with many meetings to better understand the workings of TETO and how we could most effectively help them. This required a surprising amount of time because they are such a big organisation. Since they started working in Brazil in 2006 TETO have mobilised 26,000+ volunteers and constructed 1900+ emergency houses. TECHO as a whole has mobilised 608,000+ volunteers and constructed 100,000+ emergency houses since being founded in 1997 in Chile.

Once we had understood TETO better it was time to get our hands dirty and do some manual labour. This meant two separate weekends working in the favelas, initially to move heavy house panels to where the houses would be built and another to construct the houses. The work was challenging, with 5am starts and work continuing until dark. But it was very rewarding, as we were able to work alongside many great people, including the families who always requested to assist with the construction work.

Being part of the teams of eight constructing the houses in two days really helped us to better understand the challenge of designing these houses to be simple to construct and good quality whilst keeping costs very low. Out of these weekends came some ideas of how to improve the process. For example, I designed and prototyped a small wheeled device to make heavy panels easier to move, and we proposed some changes to the tools for digging house foundations. We also investigated the manufacturing processes used to produce the houses.

This meant visiting both the factory where the house panels are manufactured and the wood treatment facility where the wooden foundation piles are treated with chemicals. One important discovery was that the wood treatment used on these piles (chromated copper arsenate) is not allowed for residential or domestic uses in Europe due to the dangers associated with the arsenic it contains. Unfortunately, it is quite challenging to find any alternatives in Brazil since the treatment is so widely used and affordable. This is an issue that will require work in the coming years to see if a safer solution can be found whilst remaining cost effective.

Since the situation in the favelas is complex, we also conducted research in order to better understand the context of our work. This is being written up into a report, which will allow society members to begin to understand the complicated situation and therefore more effectively decide on the most promising ways to improve the conditions for the people living in the favelas.

Overall, the placement has been a great experience on many different levels. Personally, I have learnt a lot by working with an effective NGO doing development work. We saw how important it is to listen to the needs of the people you are working with rather than telling them what their problems are and how to solve them – as many organisations have done in the past. The experience also opened up future opportunities should we want to do more work in international development, as places are often very competitive.

Finally, I believe the placement has been valuable as a method of laying the foundations for the joint work between TETO and the EcoHouse Society in the coming academic year. The main work during the upcoming year will be prototyping new house designs in Cambridge that will be better suited to the varied plot sizes available in favelas for constructing the houses. 

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