Mud house building with LEAD Volunteer

LEAD Volunteer (League for Environmental Advocate for sustainable Development) is a local non-governmental organization, which has been founded in the Philippines in 2003. Its mission is to increase the sharing of skills and talents, promote voluntarism toward sustainable ideal community-building projects, and build a regional and international network of volunteers. LEAD Volunteer initiates projects and initiatives, which directly or indirectly aim at preserving the environment.
Their areas of intervention include: youth empowerment (rescue team and campus organization), environmental campaign and development (campus nursery and marine protected areas), community sectoral organizing (fisherfolk and farmer's organizational support), culture and arts (artist and event organizing), agrarian reform (beneficiaries organizational capacity building assistance), mud house projects (promotion and technology transfer), and emergency response capacity building.

Since 2012, LEAD Volunteer has been involved at the Social Development Center (SDC) to support the children at risk in collaboration with Bacolod City and Virlanie Foundation. The organization is currently deploying volunteers to organize weekly music activities (drums) and it has been planned to provide the children with art therapy activities in a near future.

HOST-NGO has been recently considering the opportunity to work closer with LEAD Volunteer and possibly build a long-term partnership to act locally in the Philippines. The objective would be to jointly design and implement community-based projects based on a sustainable and eco-friendly development approach. As part of this future collaboration, HOST-NGO volunteers have recently participated into a mud house building seminar conducted by Ms. Marisol Alquizar, an active member of LEAD Volunteer.

The mud house construction is a particularly great process in terms of sustainability and environmental protection. It only requires simple natural materials: soil digged from the earth, mixed with water and sand, and added up with paddy or hay orany dried fiber or even recycling garbage. Natural resources like cement, rocks, metal from the mountains, and wood from the forests are not to be used. This technology is based on the use of easily renewable resources, which is not altering the ecosystem and the environment in general.

Mud house building also represents an undeniable asset for disadvantaged and or indigenous communities living in rural areas. These houses can be built in a few weeks on a very low investment, and would last fifty or even a hundred years.

Mud house building could definitely be considered as part of a rehabilitation program, within the frame of HOST-NGO's intervention in the Philippines and around the world.