This machine has helped our workers since 1962!! The story begins in Halifax. A friend, Don Mitchell, saw the slides of our falling down school. We were afraid to build a new 3-storey building on the site we had cut out from the mountain. The weight might be too much. Don asked how we would build. I said in re-inforced concrete. He had noticed our toy train with its stream engine. He told me to use ash hollow blocks to make the building half the weight. And so it began. This machine made tens and thousands of blocks for the new school -- and for homes, two other schools, barns, poultry buildings, retaining walls, etc. At Rs.5000/- it was the best buy of my life though (Sob!) it started me on my chronic red ink career!!

Welcome to Bina's 'house' (6ft x 8!)- Only the section on the left is Home for her, daughter and son. Every morning I used to pick up Bina to take her in my jeep -- full of SASAC goodies!! -- to her shop site. As soon as she climbed aboard, Sajan stuck his thumb in his mouth. Linus has his security blanket. Sajan has his security thumb! Homes are out of sight for the poor. Even day-laborers with steady jobs can't dream of ever owning a home. And so we pay Mike Tyson 10 million for fighting 3 minutes. And in Europe a football club paid 64 million for one player -- 3 billion, 72 million rupees! Enough to build homes for 256,000 homeless families. Makes one ashamed of saying, 'I'm from the west'.

It never dawned on my friend, Don, what harvest we would reap from his seed of concern for the poor. Don's ash hollow blocks resulted in perfect acoustics for our new school. To teach oral English, we did a lot of choral work in class. The echoes of chanting children didn't bounce around the school like blasts from a rock band. Ash blocks swallowed them as completely as the whale swallowed Jonah! And on our Himalayan mountainsides those in SASAC hollow block homes need not shiver all winter. Hollow blocks hold heat like mothers snuggling babies. Just goes to show, The Lord took Don's ash block, as he took the boy's five loaves on the hillside in Galilee and multiplied it to bring help and joy to a multitude.

When I write friends about building homes for the poor -- such a wonderful, transforming gift -- I'm sure most think of homes and not of the homebuilders. But we mustn't overlook the gift the homebuilders get. Every morning at 6, unemployed women and men stand around SASAC hoping for work. Diminished human beings they are: undernourished, discouraged, and ashamed of themselves for being so helpless in idleness, so 'unwanted'. A few days later when I see them, at work, I can hardly recognize them. How smiles can change unpleasant, haggard faces into faces beautiful! How hopes makes dull dead eyes shine with joy.

The monsoon is a monster "going about seeking whom it can devour". You're looking at its 'devouring': a 41 cm (16 inch) downpour in one day! (during its wettest month Halifax gets 5 inches!) Sita(r) is sitting with her neighbor Sharmila and husband where their homes and usable land were a day before! Sharmila's husband looks as forlorn as a man mounting the scaffold. And why not? But Sita, God love her! Talk about the stiff upper lip! What about the brave, bright smile at a time when most of us would be soaking a towel with tears?! She's a Himalayan Churchill. Give her a cigar and she could repeat his defiant words when England seemed doomed: "We will never surrender !!"

Here they are! 4 of the 8 homes we built for families who had lost everything in monsoon landslides. (The other 4 houses were too shy to get into the picture!). This picture reminds me of the hardest talk I ever gave. The 8 homeless families were among my hearers. I have to lift up their despairing spirits. Our poor Hindus have great faith in their God-given 'Dharma'. As Christians do, they too believe 'all things work to good for those who love God'. I reminded them of this. Lost in darkness they could not see, but they believed. The day came when they received the reward of their faith. Kindness of God (and our friends). They walked into one of these new homes and called it their own!