Employing people locally makes logistical sense. Why, after all, go to the trouble of ignoring the local population and and finding people from afar. However, it can be good in more than just a convenient way.

When we built Hunar Ghar we thought it would be great to have the whole village involved with the school build, so everyone could feel a part of it. We work thus evenly distributed between the families, as far as possible, so everyone would come into contact with the school and us and know a bit more about what was going on. There are other strong reasons for distributing the work too. Hunar Ghar is in an area where there are pretty challenging living conditions and people often very poor, with work only being found by migrating away from the area, leaving behind land and families. We wanted to make sure everyone could benefit from us when we were creating employment opportunities. The local work-force that summer when we built the school could stay local which is safer for them, they aren't wasting money in transport and restaurant food, and they could be closer to their families.

As part of that whole thing of helping people 'take ownership' of the project, we thought that this would help. It's pretty easy to romanticise the idea of ownership of projects after all, when the government builds schools they get paid for every day of work, and we over here certainly don't pay to build our schools! As you'd expect then, people from the village involved in the build have asked on more than one occasion why they don't get paid for 7 days, they're not really feeling the ownership thing.

So they don't feel particular ownership. It's not that unexpected really. Running a school is something that you need to be involved in day to day to really take shape of. All some people see themselves as is labour that hasn't been paid enough. What it has done though is establish a different kind of relationship with us and the village, atypical of aid agencies. We're not just a source of money and orders that must be taken to get that money, but a dynamic enterprise that than be engaged with and that tries to engage with them. Over time, as our children learn a new set of economic principles that values more than just finances, and learn how this relationship can grow and how it can be effected into the development of the village, then it will be really useful and then the ownership aspect will really start to kick in.