Pakistan and Appropriate Straw Bale Building
This is an amazing organization that I want to share with you all in hopes that you can help support what they do. You can see more about Pakistan straw bale on their website at www.paksbab.org, but to give you a general idea, they are a nonprofit organization that was created in response to the Kashmir earthquake of 2005. Much of Northern Pakistan was devastated by the earthquake and just as we are seeing today in Haiti, Chile, and Turkey, appropriate and quality housing is the difference between life and death.
To give you an idea of how important safe housing is, I recently heard that roughly 1 in 8 people in Haiti knew someone who had died due to the earthquake. That means that each living person in Haiti not only knows someone who died, but that someone in their family died. Counter that with the death toll in Chile where the housing is much better and more prepared for earthquakes and you'll see that only .01 in 1 people know someone who died. That's a shocking difference and it's ALL because of the housing.
Please check out the video below to learn more about this amazing organization and how you can help stop needless deaths resulting from earthquakes.
Paksbab Video from ZWhit on Vimeo.Of course, it's more than just earthquakes. Weather, climate, and general housing quality has an affect on the people within the homes. This organization is helping to teach people how to build themselves amazing, beautiful, and efficient homes. This is a good thing!
-Andrew Morrison