Kitsets could rebuild E Timor

By SIMON COLLINS

An Auckland-based housing association has offered to help rebuild East Timor's devastated houses using a kitset technology that can build homes for as little as $40,000 apiece.

The Cooperative Housing Association of Aotearoa-NZ made the offer to an East Timor student at Massey University who represents the country's fledgling Government in this country, Jorge Da Conceicao Teme.

Mr Teme and another Timorese student, Estanislau De Sousa Saldanha, visited the association's kitset factory in Glen Innes on Friday.

An Associate Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Matt Robson, has asked his officials to evaluate the offer.

Mr Teme, who last visited East Timor in June, said 80 per cent of the country's houses were destroyed in fighting between the independence movement and Indonesian-backed militias before independence was won last year. Before withdrawing, the Indonesians removed roofing material from many houses.

"Most of the people are still living under tents and emergency shelters like burned houses with temporary leaves," Mr Teme said.

He said aid agencies had distributed timber to some villages, but without roofing materials or training. Some houses have been built, but many have collapsed.

"People knew nothing about building the house. In Indonesian times we used to import builders from Indonesia."

He hopes that funds can be obtained from either the NZ aid programme or the World Bank to train Timorese people in the Cooperative Housing Association's system.

A founder of the association, Bill Murphy, said the kitset system was so simple that anybody could learn it quickly.

"In three weeks, we can get people from nowhere to an ability to produce their own home," he said.

Financially, the system avoids the crippling cost of interest by using family and community labour to build the first houses, then using the rent from those houses to finance building later houses. The rent is counted as payment towards eventual ownership of the houses either by individual families or the community.

In New Zealand, where the association has built 80 houses, costs have also been kept low through discounted materials and donated land.

For the past year, the association has sought Government finance to kick-start cooperative housing for low-income New Zealanders who could never afford their own houses on commercial terms. This proposal is still being evaluated by the Housing Corporation.

Herald Online feature: Timor mission

UN Transitional Administration in E Timor