Eighty-three-year-old Bang Comemoon stands in front of the makeshift shack she shares with her niece Nida in Chiang Mai.

Thailand Transformation Continued

Current Habitat homeowner Patchanee Saengboon and her 24-year-old son Worakarn understand that sentiment. The sprightly mother and son live in a solid cement house built last March with the help of volunteers from Chiang Mai Ratchapat University.

Before their Habitat house, they lived in a small one-bedroom structure of bamboo and old wood that Patchanee describes as temporary and “not so good.” Sometimes, the roof would leak. When that happened, the curly-headed 60-year-old says with a shrug and a half-smile, “you’d just look for a dry spot to move to.” Still, when her husband died and relatives came to take her and her son back to the area where she had been born, Patchanee and Worakarn wanted to stay. “‘I was born here,’ my son said. ‘I want to stay here.’ Even in the small house, even in the rain,” Patchanee recalls. And then Worakarn made a solemn promise: Someday, he said, he would build a better house for his mother.

The Saengboon family was fortunate in that they owned the land on which their house sat; Patchanee’s husband had inherited it from his family. So when a Habitat staffer who lives in the neighborhood introduced them to the idea of building a house with Habitat, they were eager to apply. Worakarn, who had studied construction in Bangkok, jumped at the chance to keep his promise. He and his mother mixed cement and helped pour the foundation. Patchanee cooked for the volunteers who came out to help. “We were really happy to be a part of building our own house,” she says, sitting on a woven mat in the shade of her white house with orange trim. She points with pride. “This is my wall.”

Today, Worakarn installs satellite dishes for a living, while his mother does a little bit of everything. She wades into the area rice fields as a worker when harvest time comes. She fishes twice a week, tucking fish, crabs and snails into a small basket tied around her waist. She collects cardboard to sell at market. Three days a week, she cleans the Chiang Mai Habitat office, or Habitat Resource Center North, Worakarn taking her there on the back of his motorbike as he heads to his own job.

“I’m lucky,” she says. “I’m very proud of what we have done, very satisfied in my life now.”

Heading out of the Chiang Mai city center, the bustling storefronts slowly give way to green. The slightly narrowing road crosses a canal where men have waded up to their waists to fish with nets. In a small rice field just minutes outside of town, slim green stalks ripple in the slight breeze. A riot of flowers and shrubs line the street, mint and mimosa meeting hibiscus and bird of paradise.

It is here that the Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project 2009 will build with a new group of partner families in November. Previously, Habitat Resource Center North has worked with families like the Saengboons, who already own land. The Carter Work Project, with its land acquisition and larger numbers of participants, represents a leap forward for this area, a leap forward for the Thailand program. “In the last two years,” says Habitat Thailand chief executive Panida Panyangarm, “Habitat Thailand has scaled up services, transforming houses, transforming lives, building holistic transformation into communities. Habitat’s new strategies have been cascading nationwide. To host a CWP build event will give us the opportunity to create awareness of Habitat, inviting partnership in the eradication of poverty housing.”

Here in northern Thailand, the main site of Carter Work Project 2009, Habitat will build on the site of a former orchard. The land that once produced mangoes and lychees waits impatiently for volunteers and families, waits impatiently to bear a different kind of fruit.

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