The Burlington Free Press
Tuesday, August 17, 2004 · Towns Editor Jessica Hyman 660-1849
or (800) 427-3124 · Page 2B
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Starksboro
Volunteers get down and
dirty
International Peace group teams up with camp
By Victoria Welch
Free Press Staff Writer
The volunteers kneeling in the shade came from Italy, France, Holland, Germany,
South Korea, Japan, Canada and the United States.
Despite their varying cultures, native languages and experiences, they shared
a common love for helping others-and mixing mud.
Her face caked in grey clay, Yu Nomura, 19, sat on a ramp leading to the main
building at Camp Common Ground last week. A large bucket propped between her
knees, the Japan native plunged her arms into a clay and water mixture, kneading
the material into a rich clay, a wide smile on her face.
The process was, she said, part of the construction of a straw bale cabin and
her favorite part of the building process. The mud would be mixed with straw
and used for insulation.
I like the clay,” she said, raising her hands to show the lumps of mud
dripping off her fingertips.
Nomura was in Starksboro as part of Volunteers for Peace, a Belmont-based organization
that has sent more than 22,000 volunteers from the United States and abroad
to work camps around the globe. She and the other 10 participants in the program
paid VFP to participate in the two-week work camp at Camp Common Ground, where
they constructed cabins that the camp will use to house its seasonal participants.
Next summer, the camp will use the cabins as part of the seasonal, family-based
programs it has offered for 10 years at several locations around the state.
Megan Brook, a member of the VFP’s board of directors, said the match
was natural, as the organizations share objectives of understanding and diversity.
“Camp Common Ground’s desire to create diversity, to bring people
together for new things, it was perfect,” Brook said. “Both of our
missions are to create understanding through experience. It was a great project
and things have been going really well.”
“Most of the volunteers came to the project with little experience in
construction,” said chief carpenter Paul Hanke. “I was nervous in
the beginning. I’ve done a lot of teaching, but not to people coming from
all over the world,” Hanke said. “But it turned out to be a lot
easier than I’d expected, helped by the fact that some speak excellent
English. I admire them so much for the way they’ve come all the way across
the world to a place they could help others.”
In their two weeks in Starksboro, the volunteers erected a cluster of wooden
cabins and a straw bale cabin, a portion of the 22 cabins that will stand on
the final site. Among the other components of the planned $5.4 million project
are winterized main and sleeping lodges, a pond, farm fields, a greenhouse,
barns and an office building, said co-director Peg Kamens.
Photo by Andy Duback, Free Press
Starksboro carpenter Jon Seeley, Waitsfield
architect and builder Lisa Williams and Maxime
Gobeil of Lac-Megantic, Quebec, plumb the
exterior of a straw bale cabin at Camp Common
Ground in Starksboro.