No more muddy walks

With the help of their bare hands and newly-acquired skills, a group of young men and women in a Sri Lankan southern village taught a community how to transform a rugged, hilly footpath into a flat motorable road.

After a year of hard work, the group - helped by their peers - built the 16-footroad from a mud-splattered, tiny footpath, thus making the poor village of Kohugoda and its 275 families more accessible to the outside world.

"Some villagers in other areas have also shown interest in our work," says Sisira Premaweera, one of the leaders of this road-building group. Learning of the community's road-building efforts, a group of local community workers from another region once visited Kohugoda while construction was going on to learn the simple technology that was used.

Like Kohugoda, many of the villages in hilly areas in the southern Galle district have no proper access roads. Residents walk down risky footpaths, which run for anything between two km to eight km, trudging to the nearest local markets about three km away to sell their garden produce. They return home with goods and essentials, carrying them on bare backs up hilly paths which are too small even for bicycles. Kohugoda is about 30 km from Galle town.

Most of the villagers grow tea, on small plots ranging from quarter acre to about two acres compared to 50 to 100 acres owned by wealthier families, Rice, spices, vegetable and betel leaf are also grown. But earnings are insufficient to feed, clothe and are also grown educate families. Many of the houses have just bare essentials and only a small section of the village, closer to the main road, has received electricity.

"Those days we could carry only loads of between 30 to 40 kg of tea leaf at a time to the leaf collecting centre, many kilometres away as vehicles could not come to our village," said Sandhya Premawansa, 21, one of the female leaders of the road building project.

Now, tractors drive up the newly built 1.5-km road and collect their produce and more quantities in one go.

It was around 1997, that the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG), a Colombo-based non-governmental agency involved in developing rural transportation, energy and other utilities, that undertook a survey with the help of university undergraduates to assess the problems of transport for villages in some southern regions.

It found that Kohugoda was one of the worst affected villages. After discussions with local authorities and the village, ITDG with financial help from the state-owned Australian Agency for International Development undertook to help build the road with community efforts.

But the most critical part of the project was that the community had to be involved and contribute towards the road-building effort. "We formed ourselves into an organisation styled the Suhada Ekamuthu (Cordial Unity) Road Development Society," said Premawansa.

Premawansa, Premaweera and three other young village leaders were picked for a crash course in road building. Two consultants from Nepal, which has a maze of mountainous roads, trained the five during a five-day programme on all aspects of road building. The experts also guided the road building process.

The five were taught how to cut mountains, slopes, break large rocks and construct culverts. The technology taught was simple, effective and cheap using the community as a focal point of the project.

The local village council provided a bulldozer to slice through difficult areas but most times it was the villagers and their bare hands that helped to cut through the mountainside.

Work started in February 1998 with groups of 30 each at a time. Women were initially reluctant to get involved in the project and their participation was as low as 10 percent. As work progressed however their awareness of the value of the project increased and their participation rose to 40 percent of the total of 260 people that helped build the road.

According to a spokesperson at ITDG, all the construction work - except for rock blasting and construction of some sections of the retaining walls, which required specially skilled workers - was done by the community.

"In some places we built 25-foot retaining walls and in some places five foot walls," said Premaweera, walking up the broad road. The village groups worked for three days of the week before others took over. ITDG paid the workers 100 rupees per day, half of their daily average earnings, since working on the road deprived them of other income. Men and women were equally paid.

Of this, 10 rupees per person was deposited in a society fund which has now accumulated to Rs. 50,000 and gains interest from a local bank. Society officials say the money is used to provide low-interest loans to members who otherwise depended on loan sharks.The next step is building another 1.5 km further up the village where there is another small settlement and Premaweera is hoping for another combined effort from the community plus some funds from a kind NGO.

For now, there is no need for children to carry their shoes and walk in the mud to faraway schools, as they did before particularly during the May to July rainy season. They have a big road and can ride bicycles or sometimes travel in the luxury of a tractor via a friendly driver to get to their destinations.

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