HFH China Hosts Build Funded By Liverpool Football Club In Pinghu
Event Is Believed To Be Habitat’s First Such Partnership With An English Premier League Soccer Club
SHANGHAI, 12th November 2010: In the first-ever Habitat partnership with an English Premier League club, Liverpool Football Club funded a special build with Habitat for Humanity China recently.
(Above) Team Liverpool volunteers clearing bricks to help HFH China build a new home for Ding and his mother Chen Gengen. (Below) Ding and his mother used to live in a house whose leaking roof was close to collapsing on them.
Volunteers from Team Liverpool traveled 110 km. from Shanghai to Pinghu county in Zhejiang province to help build a new home for Ding Amao and his mother Chen Gengen.
The one-day build was facilitated by Liverpool Vision, an economic development company of Liverpool city.
Volunteers included Rev. Dr Shannon Ledbetter, chairperson of Liverpool Habitat for Humanity, a Habitat affiliate in the UK, representatives of Liverpool Vision and corporate volunteers from Liverpool city and China-based businesses.
Fifty-seven-year-old Ding Amao and his 85-year-old mother used to live in a house built 35 years ago.
Their old house was made of mud bricks with wooden beams and a tiled roof. The roof would leak and even worse, part of it collapsed. Ding and his mother also had no access to basic sanitation facilities.
With the help of HFH China and Liverpool volunteers, Ding and his mother no longer face the risk of their house collapsing on them.
Volunteers helped knock down a wall of Ding’s old derelict house and removed the bricks by hand. They also dug trenches for foundations.
Ding’s new home is expected to be completed by the end of November.
The construction of Ding’s home is supported by Cargill, the international food and agricultural products group, under HFH China’s poverty alleviation project in Pinghu.
The build in mid-October was organized as a run-up to “Liverpool Day”, a grand finale to the British city’s six-month involvement in the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai. Liverpool and Shanghai are twinned port cities.
Separately, HFH China also hosted another group of volunteers in Pinghu. Beatrice Camp, U.S. Consul General based in Shangai, joined more than 50 student ambassadors from the USA Pavilion as well as local workers to lay the foundation of a new house.
HFH China is one of the official partners of the USA Pavilion. The USA Pavilion staff will continue volunteering at the Pinghu site to complete eight houses by late November.