A Roof for Rose

“No, young boy. Don’t do that. The first rule of the work site is safety”, Human Employment and Resource Training (HEART) NTA instructor Dalston Gilroy warned.

In another breath, he said to another volunteer, “The ridge line must be plumb. It is a serious thing.  Bring me a 2X4.”

In this, the strange llanguage of the carpenter’s world, the HEART/NTA instructor conversed with his crew of male and female roofers as they stood gingerly between roof and sky.

The men and one woman were community volunteers who had come to learn the craft of roofing as a part of the two-day Sustainable Roofing project run by the Women’s Resource and Outreach Centre (WROC) in Botany Bay, St. Thomas.

Some 35 residents, men and women came out on the first day to learn the theory of preparing roofing that would withstand hurricane force weather.

The workshop, coordinated by WROC Livelihoods Officer Nkrumah Green, the first in a series funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to provide nine communities in St. Thomas with best practices training in roofing.

According to Nkrumah Green, “what we are doing is sustainable. At the end of the day, these activities will help members of the community to do this, themselves. We are not just putting a band aid on the problem. We are actually solving it in such a way that they will always be able to provide this solution for themselves.”

Many residents in these areas, he said, will be learning roofing skills which they can use to fix their own roofs and that of neighbours, providing future employment as well. Stephen Hodges, consultant engineer for the WROC/UNDP project who was also in attendance, stated that the knowledge about construction of this kind of roofing is something that householders and carpenters alike need to know.

Carpenters, as a rule, proceed by the “look and learn” method, and not enough of them realize the measures that need to be taken if zinc is not to be torn from the rafters of the home with every hurricane force wind”, Hodges stated.

On the second day of this training project, volunteers climbed the ladder to the one-room house of 32 year old Rose Murray, an unemployed mother of five children, to completely replace the roof which had been left in a porous condition by hurricane Dean. It was a learning experience for most of them.